Letter from the Editor

The Policing Issue’s Guest Editor shares the story behind the publication of this special issue.

Neighbors, 1972

By Jennifer Rittner, Guest Editor

I was 16 when a friend of friends was arrested. When it happened, it was obvious to all of us that this was the normal state of things. The arrests got closer. A boy I hung out with. A classmate from junior high. My next-door neighbor. Mostly the guys. Almost all in their late teens and early 20s. Among the writers in this issue, several report similar stories. A general awareness of police and the looming threat of impending arrest that menaced friends and loved ones. It colored our teen years, when we did what  teenagers everywhere do: hang out, hook up, get lit, look cute, just chill. That awareness shaped our bodies, as some among us would posture in defiance, while others stilled their bodies into submission, willing the police to keep driving, don’t stop, go away.

Among the writers who contributed work to this issue, many have related similar experiences. Living in the shadow of prisons, witnessing loved ones in cuffs and squad cars, learning to look as innocent as possible as if to will the police away. The state of policing is one in which the oppression felt by marginalized communities is the normal state of things, and the means of change are so anemic that they feel more like wishful thinking than any realizable possibility.

The numbers are damning. According to The Sentencing Project, the United States is currently the overseer of 2.2 million mind-bodies being kept in legal bondage, away from their communities and loved ones, from their personal potential, from the possibility of a life beyond oppression.

The oppression we’re talking about is not just the condition of being arrested or incarcerated. As anyone following the news surely knows, it is often a matter of life and death. The Prison Policy Initiative reported, based on data collected in 2019 by Mapping Police Violence, that U.S. police officers killed 1,099 civilians that year alone. The second highest rate of police killings of civilians was in Canada, with 36. 

While our attention gets pulled by the most recent cases, the problem of police violence against civilians did not begin with the murders of George Floyd (1973-2020), Eric Garner (1970-2014), Amadou Diallo (1975-1999), Eleanor Bumpers (1918-1984), or the dozens of others whose fatal interactions with the police make headlines each year. The problems of policing are also not segregated to Black, indigenous, and immigrant communities, though our communities continue to be disproportionately impacted. We also see how a culture of policing targets all bodies that are deemed abnormal or out of place, including those of us who live at the intersections of race, neurodivergence, gender diversity, and/or disability. 

Problems of policing are rooted in the entrenchment of systems designed to enforce rigid rules of normativity, deciding who can thrive and under what conditions. In other words, we continue to keep people in their place by design. The design of systems determines where and how the presentation and aestheticization of our bodies, hair, clothing choices, walking styles, mannerisms, speech patterns, and cultural representations are acceptable, and therefore safe— and when not acceptable—then dangerous. Designers scoff at Adolf Loos’ strident treatise Ornament as Crime, but perpetuate his essential thesis, weaponizing Modernism to determine who or what has value, and deputizing gatekeepers from among the most historically privileged to maintain order that reinforces cultural supremacy. In the design of physical environments, constructed spaces determine where we are allowed to be and for what purposes. Those spaces are policed both by those deputized by the state to maintain social order, and by those who feel emboldened to deputize themselves as keepers of the unnatural order labeled by Isabel Wilkerson as the “American caste system.” 

You will see in these pages that our writers and artists are not interested in advocating on behalf of “better” policing. We are not convinced that such a thing is possible. Rather than improvements to the practices of policing, you’ll read about the types of investments in civil society that negate the need for policing as we now know it. Our writers affirm a collective demand to feel secure: in our mind-bodies, genders, homes, streets, modes of transit, and wherever we find ourselves in private and public spaces. Security and safety, for many of us, come in spite of or in the absence of policing.

While this issue of the magazine is principally focused on policing, we occasionally point to the twin evil of mass incarceration. The prison Ponzi scheme has been designed not only to pipeline mostly poor, Black, brown, indigenous, and immigrant bodies into a system that brands them as damaged goods; but it also extracts from those incarcerated bodies and their families any and every resource that might enable them to thrive beyond the carceral state. The prison industry creates wealth for the system, while nickel-and-diming prisoners and their families for everything from adequate food and clothing to communications with loved ones, and legal counsel that can be a lifeline to liberation. A major labor force in the United States, federal prisoners (those deemed able-bodied) are required to work on behalf of the prison economy, earning $.12 – $.40 per hour while producing goods and services that earn the prison system over $2 billion in revenue. Prisoners, meanwhile, earn barely enough to buy subsistence goods for themselves (food, toothpaste, books) let alone to help them pay off debts or help family members on the outside.

Designers who have worked for McDonalds, Walmart, Starbucks, Victoria’s Secret, Fidelity Investments, or American Airlines, have contributed to the prison-labor machine, as goods by these brands are often produced by substandard-wage workers in prison. In a Machiavellian twist, prison labor also produces the tools of policing, including body armor and holsters for weapons. Injury, meet insult.

So no, this issue is not calling on designers to fix the problem of policing by collaborating with existing bureaucracies. Our writers do not believe that the industry can “design-think” its way to a solution. Rather, we are hoping to reveal some of the ways in which models of dominance and dominant-cultural supremacy frame design practices, and have entrenched some of the same oppressive inequities produced by policing. 

To the extent that this issue is a critique of policing, it also affirms a vision for something better. North Carolina-based illustrator, Blacksneakers, designed the cover art, which offers her view of a multi-generational, civil society absent of policing. Our cover artist further contributed to an essay in which Ajay Revels and I reflect on ontologies of policing. In an article illustrated by Jon Key, author and former lawyer David Lamb shares his revelation that his work as a public finance lawyer in the early 90s supported youth prisons in rural America. Lamees Rahman illustrates the invisible threads of policing in a piece co-authored by Sarah Fathallah and A.D. Lewis’s critique of design thinking methods that uphold the dominant, hegemonic cultural supremacy. Jamie McGhee, in an essay beautifully illustrated by Ariel Sinha, gathers the voices of artists, writers, and designers on the future of (and without) policing. Social activist and poet Niki Franco led a provocative roundtable discussion with Ivy Climacosa, Dustin Gibson, Annika Hansteen-Izora, and Liz Ogbu, in which they reflected on abolitionist activism and the intersections of design and social justice. Social justice takes the form of mutual aid systems in an article co-authored by Stephanie Yim and Shanti Mathew, with art by Myanh Walker. CoDesign Collaborative resident designer Sophia Richardson, who worked with all of the artists on this issue, illustrated the essay in which Timothy Bardlavens and I unpack specific objects of policing. Ajay Revels also served as lead researcher on the project, supporting the writers with data points and resources throughout the process.

Organizing the entire process of preparing this issue was Jennifer Jackson, who is perhaps the most competent and patient colleague I’ve ever had the pleasure of collaborating with.

It has been an immense honor working with all of the writers and artists on this project, as well as the incredible team at CoDesign Collaborative. On behalf of the writers and artists involved with this magazine issue, thank you for supporting this project. We look forward to continuing this conversation.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Rittner
Guest Editor

Online Exclusive

Mapping Systems of Violence and Justice in Boston

By Augusta Meill, Executive Director, Agncy Design and Janelle Ridley, Director of Strategic Initiatives, City of Boston

During his most recent arrest, Marcus was taken by force and kept at the police station, sitting cold and hungry in the cell over the weekend. His court process extended over months, with multiple pre-trial appearances where he was supported by a lawyer he hired independently based on a recommendation from a friend. 

Marcus ended up taking a plea deal and spent two years in prison. Now on probation, he is working construction and talking with his probation officer monthly. He describes his transition back to his life as “catch up” — facing the challenge of picking up where he left off while also wanting to be where his friends are.

Marcus’ story reflects the complexity of the justice system, and the many pathways that an individual may take while traveling within it. “The system” includes a range of city, county, and state agencies, as well as nonprofits and other stakeholders, each with its own set of motivations and approaches. 

As the former District Coordinator for System Involved Youth at Boston Public Schools, Janelle Ridley has been enmeshed with the complexities of multi-systems that touch, hinder, and ensnare young people. However, despite her deep understanding of these systems from experiences throughout her career, explaining the intricacies of it all had proven to be a challenge, one that made it difficult to “lay it all out” in a navigable way. This laying out of the system is crucial to make those in power understand where changes can be made. For this work, Janelle partnered with Agncy Design, a nonprofit design firm, to use a system mapping approach, which has proven to be valuable, effective, and very much needed to start untangling the complexity of these intertwined systems. 

At Agncy, we’ve been working with Janelle and the City of Boston to map “the system’s” many processes, stakeholders, and dynamics, with the goal of providing opportunities for greater transparency within these complex systems. Over the past two years, we’ve used system mapping as a tool for change and empowerment. 

This approach has helped us understand what happens from the moment a young person gets arrested, to when they appear in court, and then to what happens after. It’s allowed us to weave a map of what happens in our city in response to a shooting, revealing itself as an interdependent web of stakeholders and highly conditional events. And, it has been a way to empower the users entrenched in these systems, helping them understand their own experiences and share their voices with those who have more direct power to enact change in this system. 

We share here insights from this work—how we see these maps serving both system stakeholders and citizen users, and lessons learned as we seek to improve our own practice.

Mapping for Internal Alignment

System mapping is the process of understanding the people, dynamics, relationships, and protocols (both structured and organic) within a system, and representing these visually. This process can democratize information by making what is too often unspoken or implicit, a language spoken only by system insiders, accessible and navigable to a variety of people. 

Our work mapping Boston’s Suffolk County juvenile justice system, from arrest to trial, is a good example of these system benefits. The maps we built help support stakeholders in making their work comprehensible. Systems are, of course, not static, but rather ever-changing collections of individuals who transition in and out of roles, taking their knowledge and relationships with them. System maps offer a clear articulation of the way things are done. Indeed, the maps we made for Suffolk County are now used by the District Attorney’s office as a training tool.

However, we see system mapping not as a tool for entrenching current practices, but as a vehicle for change. First, these maps align stakeholders from across the system, whether between different departments or different organizations. This alignment can bring people together to observe within the current state who is being served and how. It unlocks new opportunities, as a tool for identifying gaps or issues in the system and understanding how to harness current assets or dismantle existing structures to make these changes. In the case of juvenile justice mapping, these are being used in college coursework to educate the next generation of teachers, lawyers, or activists—folks who will be positioned to enact change.

The mapping process has confirmed for us the power of clarity in information, that simply getting the information down in a place that is accessible and shared has value. This need also reveals some of the core problems with the systems of justice that we are mapping. 

Mapping to Cut Across System Languages 

The process of mapping the justice system makes evident the lack of transparency within this system. We often find that information that is available to the public is scarce. A deeper dive into secondary learning reveals outdated data that is hard to decode. The best source of information has been interviews with system stakeholders, available to our design team only because of the access and relative power we have entering these dialogues. 

These interviews reveal the different “languages” that stakeholders across a system speak. Each organization has its own internal vernacular and acronyms, reflecting the processes, perspectives, and values that it holds. Often these languages don’t align, creating an alphabet soup of steps, activities, or roles for users to navigate. 

This interview-by-interview process of revealing the dynamics that make a system tick also exemplifies why system change is so difficult. It demonstrates how many people and organizations have to be bought into and protocolized into any changes. It highlights the reality that power is distributed unevenly across a system, and that incentives can be misaligned with what is right for organizations or stakeholders, at times in conflict with user needs or benefits. 

Our work with the City of Boston’s Office of Public Safety to map the City’s response to a shooting is an example of a diverse set of organizations striving to coordinate across their landscape. The City’s strength is also its opportunity for improvement, as it has a slew of institutions that respond to a shooting incident to support victims, families, and communities. A shooting catalyzes movement from state and local agencies and organizations, and as all of these entities work together to support communities and individuals, they each bring their own priorities to the work. For example, while many focused on the needs of the shooting victim or their family, Talia Rivera, Director of SOAR Boston (Street Outreach, Advocacy and Response) emphasized her team’s work with the friends of the victim.

The SOAR team builds relationships with gang members to support them in finding paths as alternatives to violence. In SOAR’s work following a shooting, Rivera described her team’s ability to be chameleons, lingering with the friends of the victim to monitor, diffuse and serve as buffers, with the goal of preventing retaliation. The way that Rivera describes the multiple human sides of a violent event is an example of one stakeholder’s unique “language.” Other stakeholders in this shooting response map speak “languages” of community trauma, of individual support services, of prosecution. A map is a way to level language and put everyone on the same page.

A young person plays “The Run Around” a game similar to Sorry!, where it’s almost impossible to win. This game models the system of incarceration and the difficulty of becoming truly free.

Mapping’s Power for Individual Users

The work that our team does to decode these different languages makes it clear the extent to which justice systems are not adequately accessible or just for citizen users. If the languages of the system are unclear to the stakeholders who do the work each day, working with citizen users reveals another layer of the experience, described through a personal journey, specific actions, and people. For example, in mapping the juvenile justice system with young people who had been involved in the system, it was evident how these young folks are put in situations to make decisions with little time, information, or support.

“I had maybe three minutes to make a decision [about a plea]: time to walk out of the courtroom and walk back in,” said one young person. “‘Do you want to risk it?’ That’s literally what the lawyer said. My sister and grandmother said, ‘Don’t risk it bro.’ It’s crazy how some of the judges make you pick right then and there, the judges that determine your life.”

Through our work we have also been able to reveal how different the perception is between citizen users and system stakeholders. While system stakeholders helped us fill pages of information on the process from arrest through trial, for the young people who had experienced this process, this was a side note compared to their experiences of arrest or incarceration. And yet, it was the part of the process during which they (in theory) had opportunity for influence.

A concrete example of the experience of the citizen users can be found in our work with iThrive Games Foundation and the SEED Institute on programs that use games and game design to equip young people with social and emotional skills. Through the work of game design, system-involved young people explore how their experiences with the justice system have impacted their mental health.

A board game that this team produced, called The Run Around, is an example of the user’s perspective of the system. This game is similar in play to Sorry!, with players moving from maximum security, to minimum security, to parole, and ultimately freedom. It’s been designed, however, to make it nearly impossible to “win” (become truly free), soon devolving into a sense of utter frustration and futility.

Its lead designer, a young adult who has been through arrest, trial, and incarceration, said of his experience, “Everytime I’d go [to court], I’m not myself. I would listen, but my mind is like, ‘Get out of here, go home.’ I wasn’t really in control in my life or myself when I was in court. I was moving, but I don’t know how I was moving.”

This response is typical of the young people Janelle works with. They often do not have the ability to process what is actually being asked of them, or have the support to assist them in making the best possible decisions. Their voice is not heard; a lawyer who is usually inundated with cases may spend very little time getting to know them as an individual and have only a few minutes themselves to decide how to go forward with the case. A powerful product of these aforementioned tools is making this reality both visible and visceral.

Systems are People, for Better or Worse

Our work with system stakeholders often highlights the deeply relational ways that current systems work. Nearly every person that we speak with tells us that their effectiveness is based on who they know and the trust they’ve built with those folks. While this is beautiful to see in action, it’s also fragile. 

This relational way of working places much dependence on non-protocolized interactions. Functionality, too often, relies on folks going out of their way to make the right thing happen despite rather than because of the structures in place. Designers often focus on interactions, processes, or tools created with intention—the tangible and designed. But we find in our work that this invisible force of interpersonal connection is way more powerful, and often quite fragile.

There are many moments in the processes that we’ve mapped in which a single person’s decision twists the path of the user. A citizen’s experience of justice, their freedom, or their ability to receive services may rely on who they happen to encounter, that person’s response to them, and their ability to advise or connect them with others.

An example of this tension between system and individual can be seen in Janelle’s relationship with many system-involved young people. She demonstrates the importance of the individual in having a real impact on the lives of these youths.

She also brings to life the reality that much of this work isn’t supported by the system. It’s done through the will and love of the individual. There is nothing in Janelle’s job description, past or present, that creates the expectation that she will do this type of work. And yet, it is the work that is necessary.

Janelle is one of an as yet unmapped host of people doing this work informally or without explicit structure. In interviewing young people, we hear about the folks who show up for them, and we also hear about how fleeting this can be: they lose touch with a teacher when they leave school, or a mentor at a community organization moves away.

Mapping has helped us understand that a strong, equitable justice system needs to build from and to support these relationships. It must retain this humanity; the people we have interviewed are committed to serving the people they work with. They come to this challenging work with a desire to do right by their community. An equitable system also must be more resilient than any single person within it, with structures that are user-centered and designed to enable the best in people.

A map of two sets of boundaries of the same neighborhood – one defined by the City of Boston and one defined by a young person who lives there – created during the Transition HOPE program.

The Limitations of Our Work

Finally, we seek in our work to question the role of mapping, the types of data that maps represent, and the ways that they bring this data to life. While our mapping work seeks to capture perspectives across a system, reflecting a range of perspectives, types of expertise, and power, we’ve not yet developed a synthesized solution that brings these facets together. Hopefully this will be the next iteration of our work!

We also know that the design of our maps reflect a Western approach to map-making. Dominant mapping historically represents a colonial viewpoint, continued today by surveillance-based mapping and data collection. There is a rich history of mapping counter-stories—non-dominant maps that reflect alternative mental models and ways of framing data or building taxonomies. While we strive to explore these, we’ve not yet liberated our own models to stretch our design into these places.

The best way we’ve found to rethink these frameworks is by pushing the design work beyond ourselves. For example, we worked with Transition HOPE, a summer program for system-involved youth that provides programming at colleges and universities across Boston. The objective of the summer program is to hold high expectations for every young person, to provide opportunities that are realistic and within their perspective, to help the youth envision pathways to success by taking ownership of decisions for desired long-term outcomes, and to provide encouragement to help youth acknowledge that success is theirs to claim and define irrespective of the past. Transition HOPE offers youth seven weeks of project work with professors, giving them hands-on explorations of college and career pathways. 

We spent one week with this cohort, working together to map various aspects of their spaces, communities, and relationships with violence and policing. Our process emphasized putting lived experience on the same level with more “formal” data, intentionally giving these two types of information equal importance. We explored various aspects of mapping (e.g. boundaries, locations) and overlaid different types of data, each time using the expertise of the young people and more typical system data such as police reporting.

Of course, we found that the young people had wisdom that the formal data didn’t reveal, and we also realized how much their perceptions of their communities were ingrained by systems of violence and policing.

For us, the take-away is that mapping must be simultaneously about the outcomes (the tool) and the process (the engagement). Actually doing the work can be as valuable as the tool itself in bringing people together, developing a shared understanding, and building capacity. The mapping process can be a mechanism for learning, self-reflection, and for shaping new solutions.

Plato’s Cage

An Ontology of Policing in Three Acts

Power is the ability to define reality and have others respond to it as if it is their own. – Dr. Wade Nobles

Illustration by Blacksneakers

By Ajay Revels and Jennifer Rittner

Everything made articulates a view of the world. Everything made shapes the realities experienced by others. Art, design, language, and action—these are all the ways we make sense of and share our realities with one another. They reflect the present conditions of our lives, but are often formed in the distant past, then passed from one generation to the next, where they continue to weave the invisible threads of common beliefs and values.

At their best, our ancestors designed tools that nurtured, connected, and protected. But throughout history they also built foundations of unjust power and the inhumane treatment of others. In doing so, they shaped conceptions of who should be seen, honored, and obeyed, as well as visions of the barbaric or undeserving. Constructing tools and environments of evil often served to validate the means of violence. Then, when they no longer served popular conceptions of “civil society,” the tools of violence didn’t simply disappear. Instead, they were redesigned, made palatable, and rendered invisible by complex systems, all the while continuing to provide the justification for historic injustices manifested in new forms. Conceptions of past morality, social status, and belief form the bars of cages that frame and constrain our current injustices.

Such are the historical origins of policing and incarceration. Indeed, modern practices derive from the earliest definitions of humanhood posed by Greco-Roman ancestors who queried, “What is a person? Who has the right to self-determination? Who deserves to be free?” As we question current paradigms and practices, we would do well to unpack these origins, embracing our most radical imaginations to build futures that profoundly eschew and dismantle both the tools, and the judgments, of the past. Here are three historical designs that reflect the fundamental assumptions we hold about personhood, autonomy, freedom, punishment, and the right to self-determination. The objects presented below speak to the very core of how we define criminality and punishment. They reveal how processes of redesign have made tools of inequity more ergonomic and more socially palatable, even as they perpetuate ancient or medieval concepts that align criminality with states of oppression, and reactions to criminality as the rightful domain of the most free.

Act 1. Ancient Rome

Theme: Right to Personhood

We do not see the world as it is—we see the world as we are.
– James C. Hunter

Designing Personhood
A bronze relief of a Roman soldier and a barbarian (ca. 200 CE), on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,1 illustrates a view of ancient Roman hierarchy that reflects the beliefs of the time: in part, that one privilege of freedom was the right to hold and wield power over others. The design of this relief, showing a Roman soldier forcing a prostrate individual to the ground, instantiates the hierarchical social construct. Here, the fully uniformed soldier (a proto-police officer) enacts an assumed dominance, an obvious act of violence, over the “barbarian” who is seen as powerless, anonymous, and even shapeless at his feet and in his grasp. The relief reflects and memorializes this moment, as the virile, adult male wields the power of free personhood over his dehumanized victim.

“The world as it is…”

This ancient definition of minority, male freedom as the essence of humanhood reified a central fallacy about the rights and privileges conferred to some by accidents of birth. The Ancient Greek philosopher Plato, in fact, articulated a concept of humanhood while searching for a liberal formula for civil society. He concluded that male freepersons represented the perfection of humanity, and were awarded the privilege of dominance over an unfree majority of women, children, and slaves.
This view necessitated the design of implements of force—swords, knives, whips, and armor—to maintain the separation of the unfree masses from the minority of free Roman men who either were soldiers or required their protection. Who was free and who was a slave was codified in Greco-Roman laws, which justified hierarchical systems based on gender, capital, and ultimately race, well into the modern age. Designations of freedom have consistently conferred upon those in power the right to participate in politics, thereby establishing the rules for society as a whole.

“…and as we are”

The division of people into free and unfree classes has additionally required the design of systems
for monitoring and controlling the unfree, either to subdue uprisings or to force labor. Between the powerful and the oppressed are those hired, uniformed, and armed to ensure that the will of the few keeps all others in line. Environments and eco-systems of control have been designed to isolate and dehumanize the unfree (via dungeons and torture chambers), as well as those that served to publicize and perform the spectacle of punishment (coliseums and cages). Each design has served its purpose: establishing a social order in which some assume freedom and control over others who are deemed less human, and therefore useful only insofar as they serve the free minority.

Act 2. Medieval Europe

Theme: Torture as Punishment

The people who make wars, the people who reduce their fellows to slavery, the people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, the really evil people in a word—these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.
– Aldous Huxley

Designing Mean Machines
Instruments of torture were thoughtfully prototyped, designed, and produced with social impact in mind to psychologically terrorize, socially humiliate, and physically torture those deemed worthy of punishment. The goal of these machines was to inflict terror and enact violence in ever newer, more innovative ways. In fact, empathy was the point, as designers and operators of these devices tapped into their own insights and observations about the suffering of others in order to optimize the success of their inventions.

The garrote was designed around 1000 CE to terrorize and torture as a legitimate form of punishment for offenses against the state. Seated on a narrow slab, the tortured individual would be held in place by a metal strap across the neck, preventing their movement as well as constricting their airway and ability to swallow. It is a slow, painful death by design, in full view of the public who could observe the tortured individual drooling and gasping for air. Thoroughly dehumanized. Thoroughly punished. Thoroughly modeling the power of design to dehumanize both the captive and the captor, as the perpetrators of this violence either gloried in the pain they inflicted or were rendered immune to it as society endorsed the action either through their acceptance or their silence.

“Virtuous, respectable men…”

In pre-modern Europe, the power to “police” citizens was held by the privileged classes who claimed
the rights of ownership, which centered power around the accumulation of property. As those with property had the means to secure protection, incursions against property could therefore be classified as a punishable offense. The dominance of an elite minority became practically ubiquitous in Europe, as feudal lords transformed the political and geographical landscape into a chessboard of feudal castles at the expense of violence to and domination of the peasants who lived in their realms. Through force of starvation, torture, or death, these peasants became unfree serfs, bound to the soil, working their own land and providing their harvests to the protected occupiers of estates.
Though the history is complex, some familiar themes emerge. As landed gentry claimed power, they also required protection. Through the means of wealth and privilege, they leveraged their power over unlanded men who, bereft of opportunity and willing to take up a good fight, were put into service as protectors of the gentry classes, and therefore protectors of property. Specialized protection corporations of knights were armed with long swords, axes, chain mail, and full-body armor fashioned by local steel smiths.

“…who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes.”

In the name of the state, justified by religion, in service to ideologies of freedom and justice—people in power have justified the oppression of specific populations in service of maintaining their own privilege. What we see in the instruments of torture is the professionalization of the role of torturer—the executioners of the state’s will. The state could deputize those willing to serve as arms of power, giving them the tools, incentives, and protection to detain and punish at will. The norms established during this period have informed modern and now contemporary expressions of power, privilege, and punishment—who is the owner and who is owned, who determines the rules and who must abide by them.

Even in a democratic society, the same norms can be seen. The same value structures that validated torture in the Middle Ages are applied to the design of contemporary forms of punishment, made palatable for modern sensibilities. The design of courthouse jails, which are routinely built beneath the public areas in what, at least in New York, are referred to as the tombs. In a breathless article published in The New York Times in 2011, Jim Dwyer celebrates the punishing intention in the design, saying, “A prisoner going to court from the Metropolitan Correctional Center is presented to federal marshals in the basement of the building. Shackled at the ankles, chained at the waist and cuffed at the hands, the prisoner hop-marches through a tunnel nearly 40 feet below the street.” Spaces named for the dead, designed to punish the living. Spaces designed to deaden, to create things. The dungeon, an early prison prototype, has only moderately evolved from its ancient origins. These dark, dank holding spaces are the architectural forebearers of the Portuguese, British, and French forts and dungeons that were built on the west coast of Africa, which provided the template for the prison ships and plantation breaking cells of the colonial era.

Act 3. Colonial America

Theme: The Disposable Human

The civilized have created the wretched, quite coldly and deliberately, and do not intend to change the status quo; are responsible for their slaughter and enslavement; rain down bombs on defenseless children whenever and wherever they decide that their “vital interests” are menaced, and think nothing of torturing a man to death: these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the “sanctity” of human life, or the “conscience” of the civilized world.
– James Baldwin

Designing Human Capital
A starting point for understanding the centrality of design in enabling the systems of racial dominance comes to us in the form of specially refurbished vessels designed to optimize the space for human cargo, who were both highly valued and largely disposable. These floating dungeons were designed and constructed to maximize humiliation, degradation, and dehumanization, turning men and women not just into prisoners but livestock.

The captors of human cargo were almost equally impacted by design, as they were forced to embrace the barbarism of their roles as captors, slavers, and wielders of unearned power inflicted with whips, chains and branding irons. The privileges of freedom were to become enshrined in law as slavery enriched and debased European slavers, transforming evil into normal and rendering invisible the suffering of millions.

“The civilized have created the wretched.”

In the colonial era, particularly in the United States, policing and definitions of criminality have directly been tied to race and power, as Isabel Wilkerson so thoroughly outlines in her book Caste, on American caste systems through which racial classification and animus are perfectly expressed through systems of criminal (in)justice and through cultural norms.

Disposable humanity is a feature, rather than a bug, of the American system of labor. American agriculture developed almost exclusively as a result of European slavers treating enslaved laborers as the faceless tools of pro-duction. In fact, the Machiavellian thesis of settler colonialists could be defined as “the product of labor justifies its means,” a philosophy that shows up repeatedly as the disposability of humans across the landscape of American labor systems. We see it in the development of the transcontinental railroad, where managers of the Central Pacific line overworked and underpaid the tens of thousands of Chinese-born immigrants who labored six days a week in grueling conditions to build a central American infrastructure. Nameless, faceless laborers building the American Dream. We see it, as well, in educational models like the Indian boarding schools, where white Christian pedagogues stripped individuality, language, history, clothing, and even their hair, away from children in order to render them culture-less, disconnected from land, family, and ancestral knowledge. The culture itself becomes a disposable object and the children made visibly indistinguishable through uniform haircuts and clothing.

The age of the disposable human didn’t end with the abolition of the slave trade or the end of slavery. Disposability came to define our American experiment as human bodies have been perpetually claimed in service of expansion and unity. Exhausted and replaced as needed, counted and documented only insofar as it was required to track the value of their labor, our country’s migrant and
immigrant labor, low-wage workers, and service workers came to be valued more for their faceless expendability than for any notion of their individual contributions to the development of urban infrastructures, the vibrancy of our metropolitan marketplaces, the robust diversity of the cultural products that define American art and design, and that keep our farms, factories, hospitals, schools, and civil services functioning.

“The conscience of the civilized world.” Over the years, slave ships were trans-formed on land and took new forms that continued to reaffirm the disposability of Black bodies when they no longer served as sources of labor or entertainment: slave ships turned into slave cabins, cabins ultimately became housing projects, ghettos, slums; and these have transformed again into gentrified neighborhoods that welcome the white and wealthy at the expense of Black communities that continue to be treated as expendable.

The built environment often supports the primacy of the valued “haves” over the devalued “have nots.” Black bodies have been zoned away from sight whenever, wherever, and however possible, on transportation, in housing, in schools and workplaces, and as much as possible through the criminal justice system, which continues to place a premium on moving Black bodies off of the street, out of the schools and into modern-day dungeons. Just as slave labor found justification through the banalities of colonial and post-colonial systems, the convict leasing schemes that replaced them continued the practices of creating free labor, by establishing laws that would criminalize the poor and Black. Today’s prison systems, enabled by contemporary policing practices, double down on convict leasing by both charging prisoners for basic amenities (like clothing and toiletries) and utilizing their labor to pro-duce commercial products and services. The free labor pool of prisons is one of the dirtiest secrets of our free market, and it depends on the anonymity of those who comprise the workforce. It relies on a collective willingness to perceive the makers of our things as nameless, faceless tools of production, the ghosts imprisoned in the machine.

As detailed in a 2020 report by the Corporate Accountability Lab, American companies continue to perpetuate the means of human disposability, in part predicated on the productive utility of unfree bodies, and the justifications of linking punishment with a common good. Golf shirts, circuit boards, furniture, poultry processing, sports apparel, pet products, and textiles all rely on these toxic ontologies of human worth. And they rely on policing systems that, through ways that are all-too-opaque, feed those American prison labor markets by criminalizing, policing and punishing those Black, female and even child bodies labeled as most disposable.

Act Next. Stepping Out of the Cage

You have to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world. And you have to do it all the time.
– Angela Davis

Designing Transformation
What we see in all of these objects are expressions of power: the power to define, to control, and to constrain those determined to be undeserving of power or autonomy by those who have assumed the rights of freedom.
One of the great reckonings we are now con-fronted with is the degree to which policing is inadequate to the tasks of complex, equity-centered, social systems. We have watched policing inappropriately respond to challenges of the homeless, those experiencing mental health crises, victims of domestic violence, and the mistakes of youth. We have watched as police inflated (or distort, exaggerate) justifications to surveil, arrest, shoot, or choke citizens who were driving, jogging, BBQing, sleeping, or shopping while Black.

“Radically transform the world…”

By design, we are faced with the successes of the ontological model at the expense of a truly civil society. As such, we must confront the failures and chart new mental models that radically transform the world. As a profession, design should aim to design systems built on assumptions of equal personhood, and intentionally dismantle systems that affirm greater freedom for those with privilege. Striving to create systems and products that protect and affirm the whole humanity of a person at every stage of their interactions with safety personnel, and dismantling systems that rely on any form of physical, psychological, or social harm in the name of justice, are integral steps that need to be taken to transform inequitable power dynamics in our society.

Calls for police reform are inadequate, because they often seek to simply change the “look and feel” of violent objects that have been in service to an inequality project that stretches back in time to the Greco-Roman era. The seed-ling of modern policing sprouted from the soil of an ideal Platonic society of un-equals that centered and protected landed, free men. This sapling developed new objects of torture, punishment, and humiliation during the European Enlightenment era. The growing tree evolved its branches in legal and enclosure apparatus in the form of papal bulls, convict ships, and Black Codes during the European colonial period. Now this destructive tree is casting its shadow over a society feeling the brutality of its unjust policing practices.

Calls for police reform are inadequate, because they often seek to simply change the “look and feel” of violent objects that have been in service to an inequality project that stretches back in time to the Greco-Roman era.

“…do it all the time.”

Ending the brutality of policing will require the complete abolition of all underlying belief systems that deny humanity for the many; the laws that criminalize physical traits like skin color; the worldview that rewards the hyper-individualistic to acquire and hoard vast wealth; and the design praxis that brings an ergonomic approach to objects of lethal social exclusion, punishment, and enclosure.
If the ontology of policing activates the belief that the system of policing has the right and the mandate to protect the property of the privileged classes; to maintain the separation of free and non-free; to designate Black bodies as cheap labor; to watch Black bodies to make sure they move within approved spaces; and to kill Black bodies to remind them that they are expendable at any moment; then design must use all of its powers of imagination, creativity, strategy, collaboration, good will, and technical know-how to bring about new possibilities that break with the past. We encourage a continued excavation of our shared, historical ideals—from Plato’s ideal man to the ideologies of social justice—in order to forge a society of actual liberty, opportunity, and justice for all.

Sometimes we have to do the work even though we don’t yet see a glimmer on the horizon that it’s actually going to be possible.
– Angela Davis

The Ghosts of Prisons Past

This is a horror story.

Illustration by Jon Key

By David Lamb

The kind of parable Ralph Ellison crafted in Invisible Man, which is to say, not a work of science fiction or fantasy, but of the phantasmagorical effects of systematic racism.

Like many writers I am haunted by ghosts. Many times, these ghouls are tangible: the specter of family trauma or glimmers of relationship drama. Sometimes, however, these phantoms are more elusive. They haunt me and I don’t even realize they are plaguing my thoughts; fighting to express themselves and forcing their way into dialogue, characters, and plots.

For many years, I was haunted by the ghost of the prison industrial complex, both as a result of my exposure as a potential victim and my experience as a potential enabler. This guilty presence forced its way into my novel, On Top of the World—a reimagining of the story of Ebenezer Scrooge in a modern hip hop context. Instead of old Scrooge fashioned as a Victorian money lender, he takes the shape of music’s biggest star and biggest sellout. Young, Black, and handsome, he is at one and the same time a potential victim of the relationship between prisons and profit—and through his thuggish, materialist messaging— one of its foremost enablers.

But where did this story come from? From the visions that haunted me. As writers we draw inspiration from our own lives for source material. And without truly realizing it, I was drawing from the horror I experienced when I connected the dots between what on the surface was the seemingly innocuous work I was doing as an attorney working as Bond Counsel on Wall Street in the early 90s and my witness of the concurrent terrors of the federal government’s War on Drugs. The sudden, shocking realization that these deals—worth tens to hundreds of millions of dollars for prisons, euphemistically branded “youth facilities”— were in fact part and parcel of the acceleration of mass incarceration for profit.

Plausible Deniability and the Unspoken Code

Let me begin before that realization, back to the last time I was nearly arrested by a system designed to incarcerate.

It was Thanksgiving, 1992. My cousin and I had gone to the movies. Afterward, we hailed a cab, but rather than driving us to our destination, the driver told us, “Black people have to pay first.” Rather than agree, I began writing down his license number to report a com-plaint, but he reached back and snatched his identification before I could, and then began driving off erratically before screeching to a stop just in time to avoid crashing into a police car. Two irate, young cops clad in white privilege and blue uniforms hopped out of the squad car demanding to know what was going on, but before I could utter a single syllable, they had immediately jumped to the cabbie’s side; threatening to arrest my cousin and me for “theft of services,” because the meter read that we owed $2.50. In a moment of outrage, I played my lawyer card, telling them the firm I worked for on Wall Street, and asserting that I wasn’t paying a thing. One young officer said, “Yeah, you sound like a lawyer, you’ve got a big mouth.” I replied, “Be that as it may, I’m not paying a thing.” They then asked us how we knew that the cabbie wanted us to pay in advance because we were Black. We replied, “Because he said so.” At which point the shocked cops asked the cabbie, “You said that?!” It seemed clear to my cousin and me that the officers’ response was not out of any sense of fairness. Rather, it was an admonishment for the cabbie’s frank honesty. We read their intention as a warning to him: “Don’t you understand how this works? Be racist, but with plausible deniability.”

Plausible deniability—that’s what public service rhetoric and platitudes such as “Courtesy, Professionalism and Respect” give law enforcement: a veil of plausible deniability that masks systematic racism. But whatever the platitudes, the system continues to work as it was designed, which was driven home to me when mere moments after giving us the cabbie’s license number those same officers trailed us in their squad car as my cousin and I walked to the train, all the while glaring at us and whispering racial epithets. The veneer of plausible deniability completely stripped away.

Bonds for Bondage

This brings me to the moment of the realization that I was unwittingly enabling this system whose endgame was mass incarceration to expand its reach. I had just graduated law school and was working on Wall Street as Bond Counsel. Bond Counsel—it sounds so innocuous. Unlike other lawyers, Bond Counsel does not technically represent a party. Instead, lawyers ostensibly represent the public good. You can think of it this way. Thanks to another lawyer, Ralph Nader, Americans now have greater consumer protection laws because a Bond Counsel negotiated a deal with the federal government on behalf of the people. Working on behalf of the public means that Bond Counsels are entrusted to represent an underlying social contract a government forms with its citizens. It acknowledges that, such as in the case of consumer protection, the people cannot rely on promises from manufacturers or experts hired by the manufacturer to work toward social good against their financial interests. Good luck driving that exploding car.

This was the situation that bondholders found themselves in during the 19th century, when rich railroad moguls would issue bonds for the construction of railways they had no intention of building. Bondholders, taxpayers, and cities were left screwed in the process. In order to protect the public and stop these types of fraud, the position of Bond Counsel was created to: 

• Study the law related to the bond issuance
• Issue an opinion confirming that the bonds are indeed validly issued and have a legitimate purpose and source of payment
• Determine whether the bonds are tax exempt

These procedures are put into place and executed in order to professionalize the process, and, in theory, to protect people from fraud. But remember, this is a horror story, and beneath the veneer of respectability and professionalism that surrounds both the police and the bond market, there’s a monster that feeds on greed lying in wait. The terror is much worse, I discovered, when it’s not just a greedy corporate titan, but the governmental system itself that is engaged in morally decayed practices whose perpetuation and expansion rely on the sale of valid government bonds. Yes, the bonds may be legally issued and the bondholders can be assured of payment—but what is the source of payment, and even if legal, what if it’s immoral?

This is the question I was forced to ask myself when I realized that the “youth facilities” bonds I was helping to be issued were in fact paying for the construction of prisons that validated the capture and imprisonment of more Black bodies. In fact, the debt and interest on these bonds had to be paid by housing more and more prisoners in these facilities. Without enough prisoners, the bonds would default and the system would collapse; and so the secret truth was that in the land of the free there was simply not enough crime to justify the construction of so many prisons.

Take the state of Minnesota as a case in point. In 1992, through the use of $28.4 mil-lion in bonds, the state financed the construction of the Prairie View Correctional Facility. And like the old railroad bond catastrophes from a century before, it was a disaster. The shiny, new 1,600-bed prison opened to much fanfare—and then—sat empty. The project had been built to stem the economic decline in the city of Appleton, Minnesota—a tiny, overwhelmingly white, rural town of less than 2,000 people—by creating nearly 200 jobs. The prison was constructed, but there were no prisoners—the stage was set for a massive failure. But in this moment of need, the towns-folk leapt for joy when the city of Appleton signed a deal with the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico to house 516 prisoners. At the time, government officials were elated. Paul Michaelson, Executive Director of the Upper Minnesota Valley Regional Development Commission, concluded, “This project has had a positive effect on the whole region. It shows us that people want to stay in this area or move back here as long as there are jobs.” Articles even applauded the fact that some of the prospective prison staff had even begun to study Spanish to better communicate with the new inmates.1 More recently, Minnesota state representative Tim Miller (R-Prinsburg) submitted a new bill requesting that the Appleton prison be reopened, celebrating the “roughly 300 good-paying union jobs to Swift County residents” that would be created as a result.

And it wasn’t just Appleton. To solve this dilemma of not enough crime, other states began importing prisoners from Puerto Rico. Let me state that again—some states began importing prisoners from Puerto Rico, in order to have enough prisoners to justify their excessive prison construction and receive enough funding to pay the bond debt, which would come from the money the Puerto Rican government would pay them to house prisoners.

As an African-American who grew up very intimately with the Puerto Rican community in New York City, this was a horrifying, demoralizing discovery for me. I had to ask myself, “What if these prisoners were from Ghana, Nigeria, or Senegal?” Would I then have unwittingly been a participant in a mod-ern-day Triangular Trade reminiscent of the trade that brought untold enslaved Africans to the Americas in the hulls of ships? And if so, is the monstrous system continuing to operate the way it was designed not just for decades but centuries?

The system was intentionally designed to leverage the opacity of the bond issuance process. If you didn’t look too closely, you would see the movement of paper, data, funds, and resources from one place to another. At each stage in the process, the facilitators of this process could move their pieces at a purely procedural level. In abstraction, no one was actually exchanging money for human bodies, except that everyone was. The bond itself lies at the root of bondage; and the issuance of bonds to contribute to the movement of bodies from anywhere—New York, Puerto Rico, Ghana—into prison cells (or, remember that these were intentionally branded as “youth facilities”) finds a close equivalent to that Triangular Trade that constitutes the immoral center of our national, social debt. 

Lest you think this is a problem of the past, let me note that the economic devastation caused by Hurricane Maria in 2018 spurred the Puerto Rican government to once again seek to ship prisoners to the mainland.

This pattern is reflected all over America, the need to house prisoners (from mostly poor, Black and Latino inner-city communities) to provide jobs and economic vitality for decaying, mostly white, poor rural towns. By design it fosters racism inherently when the only Black and brown people in your small town are in prison. By design it increases crime inherently, because you need more and more arrests to feed the system to pay the bonds—and therefore the definition of what is criminal by design must expand. Which is why, even though marijuana was “legalized” in Colorado, the law was designed in such a way that in Colorado, Black folks still get arrested at four times the rate of whites for marijuana possession.

The more I look at the picture, the clearer the dastardly design becomes—to pay the debt which enabled their excessive construction, prisons must have prisoners. The truth is, we don’t need so many prisons. The truth is, we can reduce crime with less police. The truth is, this is neither conjecture nor romantic fantasy, but it is rooted in the facts on the ground in Camden, New Jersey. Once regarded as the most dangerous city in America, Camden had to rethink policing after it was forced to lay off half its police force due to budget cuts. To adjust to these drastic cuts, Camden reimagined the architecture of its police force; shifting to a focus on community policing and improving relations between the police and the community, and guess what—crime went down. Between 2012 and 2019, the murder rate in Camden fell 63 percent. Yes, crime rates dropped across the country, but not nearly by that much. Police Chief Scott Thomson said that things began to change when he shifted the officers’ identity from warriors to guardians. There were still problems, such as massive overwriting of fines for petty offenses (a particularly egregious way that poor cities finance their budgets on the backs of poor residents), but after community complaints, the department moved away from this practice, relations with the community began to improve, and crime continued to fall.
The moral of the story is that not all horror stories have to end tragically, but it requires vision to write a new, more hopeful narrative. 

How Can I Help?

Mutual Aid as a Response to Harmful Systems

Shanti and Stephanie discuss mutual aid’s historical and current purpose: to support communities when other systems fail.

Illustration by Myahn Walker

By Shanti Mathew and Stephanie Yim

Anatomy of an Arrest

In New York City, when an individual is arrested, they are stripped of their belongings and thrown into a black box, disconnected and isolated from their families, friends, and communities. Sometimes they’re allowed to make a call on a dial-pad phone to a number that they must have memorized. They must hope that someone picks up a ringing phone—no matter the time of day—and comes to their aid.

Once arrested, the individual is shuffled between police precincts and then eventually transported to the arresting borough’s central- booking facility. They will wait between 24 and 48 hours in a squalid cell crowded with other arrestees and one metal toilet littered with feces and urine. Without information and sustenance except for a slice of cheese between two slices of bread, they wait for their arraignment hearing, at which time a judge will determine if they remain in jail, can be released on bail, or return home for a later court date.

In the last published report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, almost 90 percent of defendants are indigent and don’t have access to legal support before their arraignment. If they cannot afford their own private counsel, they will be assigned a public defender 15-30 minutes before arraignment. Once their arraignment hearing begins, they will be read their charge(s) and asked how they plead. Thirty minutes is not much time to do justice for each defendant, and to find the best argument for their freedom.

By law, a judge is meant to determine the outcome of the arraignment based on the individual’s risk to flee and not appear for their future court dates. However, data continues to show that only a small percentage (15 percent in 2017) of those released, regardless of charge severity, missed one court date.

Instead, frequently a judge determines the outcome of the arraignment based on the individual’s ties to their community. An existing job, a permanent home address, someone the client can call, or a loved one who can show up at the time of arraignment. These are all imperfect representations of community ties that can significantly impact the outcome of an arraignment, including influencing the bail amount that is set. In this system, those who are homeless, unemployed, or separated from their families are penalized. Further penalized are the poor, who will land in jail because they or their loved ones cannot afford their bail. In this system, freedom has a price tag.

At this very moment, there are over 7,500 people sitting in pretrial detention in New York City, waiting for their trial before being convicted of any crime. That number is about 77 percent of the average daily population in jail. Even though our Constitution ensures a speedy trial, prosecutors in New York City can stop the trial clock until they are “ready” for the trial, causing the average lengths of stay in jail to vary greatly. On average, people are detained for over 57 days for nonviolent felonies.
Detained in jails like Rikers Island and The Boat, people, including incarcerated youth, experience violence from corrections officers and inhumane conditions. Kalief Browder, a teenager who was arrested for allegedly stealing a backpack in the Bronx, spent three years on Rikers awaiting his trial. Of the three years, two were spent in solitary confinement. Browder committed suicide two years after his release at the age of 22. Browder’s tragic and horrifying story has pushed criminal justice reform in New York City in the last few years—many years too late, some might say.
From the moment they are arrested, an individual’s path is laden with hurdles to returning home safely without the lifelong con-sequences of a criminal record. From the beginning, the police, court, and system are designed to break individuals physically and emotionally. Under the pressure of repeated violence and dehumanization, an individual is likely to accept a plea bargain to escape their horrifying situation. In a report published by the Vera Institute of Justice, pretrial detention increases the chances of a jail sentence by 40 percent for misdemeanors. An unwarranted arrest for a low-level crime, or worse, a wrongful arrest, can ripple through an individual’s family and extended community, tearing lives apart.

Policing in America

The history of policing in the Northeastern region of the U.S. begins with the founding of Boston’s night watch in 1636, a group of volunteers who would keep watch of the town at night to warn of impending danger. It wasn’t until the early 1800s that night watches would transform into police forces that employed full-time police officers. The formation of these first forces were largely supported by merchants, who wanted police officers to maintain the “orderliness” of their workforce and the urban environments in which they conducted their business.

Rather than mercantile interests, policing in the American South has its roots in the institution of slavery. The first slave patrol was founded in the Carolina colonies in 1704. These patrols monitored the behavior of Black slaves, returning runaway slaves to their owners and terrorizing slaves into obeying plantation rules. Once slavery was abolished in the United States, the South sought to maintain social order by evolving slave patrols into police units that enforced the Jim Crow segregation laws that restricted Black rights.

Whether to maintain orderly labor for factory production in the North or restricting the rights of Blacks in the South, those in power used local police forces to control the disadvantaged populations, eventually opening the door to crime prevention and community surveillance. Instead of only reacting to crimes, police were given a mandate to stop crime before it happened, leading to the insertion of police presence into everyday life.

While policing has evolved over the years since—police eventually gained uniforms and firearms and shed formal ties with local political wards—the roots of behavior control and community surveillance can still be seen today, especially in historically oppressed communities.

Today, white individuals engage in criminal activity at the same rate as Black individuals: driving over the speed limit, drinking an alcoholic beverage in the park, using an illegal drug, or letting your dog off the leash in a public area. The difference is not in the number of crimes committed, but in the number of crimes observed.

Over their lifetimes, over one in three Black men in America can expect to be incarcerated, versus one in 17 white men. White communities are less frequently surveilled, detained, and violated by police. The over-surveillance and hyper-intervention of police in marginalized communities lead to increased interactions with the criminal justice system.

The effects of these interactions are not restricted to the moment they occur. For every year they are incarcerated, individuals lose on average two years of their life expectancy. Black and brown folks are often arrested for “fitting the description,” low-level quality of life crimes, or for simply being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Laws that prevent previously incarcerated people from accessing housing and jobs increase their likelihood of homelessness and diminish their ability to create wealth. These effects are not restricted to the individual’s life, but have long-lasting consequences for their families and communities. 

Meeting Needs Through Mutual Aid

Throughout history, marginalized communities have turned to each other for support when social systems have failed them, or worse, oppressed them. As defined by Dean Spade, a trans activist and lawyer, mutual aid is “about people coming together to meet each other’s basic needs with a shared understanding that the systems we live under are not going meet our needs… It’s a form of political participation in which people take responsibility for caring for one another and changing political conditions.” Furthermore, mutual aid enables those directly impacted by harmful systems to meet their needs and invites them to join the resistance. These groups build solidarity by helping disadvantaged communities design a new relationship to those in power. Or as Dean Spade puts it, mutual aid is more successful and differs from other reform movements because it, “mobilize[s] people, especially those most directly impacted, for ongoing struggle.”

One of the first Black mutual aid groups dates back to 1787, when the Free African Society (FAS) was created to provide support for free Blacks.12 FAS provided housing, food, childcare, and care for the sick in the absence of support from colonial governments that, at best, neglected their needs, and at worst, applied oppressive legal and economic measures against them. The New York Committee of Vigilance would continue the tradition in 1835 by protecting fugitive slaves fleeing state-sanctioned violence in the South, many of whom were not eagerly welcomed or sup-ported by Northern governments.

Mutual aid groups flourished in the 1960s, amidst the efforts of the Civil Rights Movement. The Black Panthers ran 60 social-survival programs, including free ambulance services, medical clinics, and rides for the elderly. One of their most successful programs provided free breakfast to poor children to support them through the school day. These mutual aid groups provided access to basic needs, but also educated and mobilized communities to fight for justice.

And the tradition continues to this day. The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the gaping holes in our American social safety net and given rise to numerous community-designed and -led initiatives. Neighbors quickly created mutual-aid groups, restaurants donated meals, people raised money to provide housing to trans folks, and non-Black allies pro-tested alongside Black organizers. In every instance, communities followed a tried and true blueprint of care and creativity.

The Day I Went to Court

On March 26, 2018—though truly it could have been any other day in Brooklyn—a court officer shuffled my partner and me (Stephanie) into the last row of benches, as an arrested person was escorted in by a police officer. The officer freed the man from handcuffs and ordered him to stand next to his public defender at a podium. The prosecutor across the aisle read out the charges: grand larceny, trespassing, and other inaudible alleged crimes that amounted to a bail request of $10,000.
We found ourselves in this courtroom due to a project called Court Watch NYC, which organizes ordinary citizens to observe court proceedings and report what they see. The goal is to hold the legal actors of our criminal justice system accountable to the recent bail reforms. The reforms sought to reduce the high number of people in jail for low-level misdemeanors. Ultimately, the project is designed to protect the communities, namely Black and brown, that have always been disproportionately and unfairly affected by predatory police practices and arrests.

I learned of Court Watch NYC after pivoting my design career into the social jus-tice space. In 2016, I co-founded a nonprofit called Good Call, which ran a free 24/7 arrest-support hotline in New York City. During my time as Good Call’s Director of Design, I increasingly realized that my role as a designer was best served by being an ally, rather than being solution oriented. It was often better to show up and follow the lead of the community members we worked with, or to listen to what the recently arrested needed in the moment.

Neighbors Designing Justice

I volunteered at organizations like Court Watch NYC to learn how to shift my design principles beyond human-centered to com-munity-centered design. Court Watch NYC is just one example of a familiar story: com-munities organizing and embodying the characteristics of mutual aid to protect them-selves from aggressive systems. Just like in the case of mutual aid groups, communities must design their own practices and habits to ensure justice when the legal system incarcerates the innocent.
The CopWatch project run by the Justice Committee in New York City continues a practice started by the Black Panthers in the 1960s, to monitor and document police interactions with the community. The organization also teaches community members about their rights and how to keep their neighborhoods safe.

In New York City, defendants can be assigned a $1 bail for a minor crime, if they have an open case for another more-serious charge. Due to poor communication, families often pay the larger bail, but are unaware of the smaller bail, leaving the defendant needlessly incarcerated without conviction. Created by the Bronx Freedom Fund, the Dollar Bail Brigade is a New York City coalition of more than 1,000 New Yorkers who volunteer to report to city jails and post $1 bails for their neighbors.
Communities United for Police Reform (CPR) is a coalition of community organizations advocating for criminal justice and legislative reform at the municipal and state levels in New York. Designing campaigns, raising awareness, and pushing for policy change, CPR builds solidarity and mobilizes those most directly affected by the criminal justice system to fight for alternatives to policing. Groups such as these strive to dismantle the system from the outside.

Like mutual aids, the people who make up these organizations believe that communities cannot wait for change to come to them, but that they must design the structures they need not only to survive, but to thrive.

On the other hand, organizations like NYC Together work to redesign policing from within the system. In addition to providing support for youth who are arrested, NYC Together aims to build stronger partnerships between youth and local police officers through community dinners, leadership training, and community service projects. By fostering mentoring relationships, NYC Together reduces tension and distrust for police officers while supporting communities’ youth development.

From organizing for policy change to real-locating resources, each one of these groups brings together those who need help and those who can help. Like mutual aids, the people who make up these organizations believe that communities cannot wait for change to come to them, but that they must design the structures they need not only to survive, but to thrive.

Showing Up to Help

Back in the Brooklyn courtroom, after the district attorney requested a $10,000 bail, the public defender laid out the arrested man’s community ties. He had a job at a construction site, a church he attended, and a daughter that he lived with. The public defender requested that the judge carefully consider if the man was truly a flight risk and to release him so he could return to his family and job the next day. Ultimately, the judge refused the district attorney’s bail request and released the man without bail.

As reported by previous court watchers, the presiding judge has ruled without bail often. Many accused are not so lucky. Arraignments before more punitive judges and in courts with a history of unjust rulings end in detention more often than not, resulting in punishment for the accused well before trial or conviction. For many accused, this has meant job loss, disconnection from family and friends at a moment of personal crisis, lack of access to basic health needs or nutrition, and lifelong trauma.

Sitting in the courtroom, jotting down notes about the arraignment proceedings, I under-stood that although my data points are singular, they contributed to a larger shift in thinking about how ordinary citizens can play a role in an otherwise foreign, bureaucratic, and complex system.

As a designer I act as a researcher, facilitator, and a maker. However, in the redesign of policing, designers may need to play a different role. This role is about learning and supporting the communities who have been organizing, leading, and most importantly, persevering through the brutal, oppressive history of policing in America. Designers have the skills and bias toward invention, but the very same skills put us at risk of feeling like the only “solution-makers” in the room. That somehow, our social ills still exist because the right people with the right skills have not yet designed the right solutions.

But if we look to historically oppressed com-munities, we see how wrong that assumption is. We see people who have been fighting and inventing and acting on each other’s behalf for centuries. Community members are constantly designing interventions, working with alternate frameworks, and facilitating conversations that are beyond those taught and used in traditional design toolboxes. Perhaps the designer’s most important role is to show up and contribute to the team. To position our skills of research, facilitation, and making in service of the true experts—the impacted com-munities themselves.

Indeed, designers have skills to contribute to the cause of justice. Inside and outside of institutions, the path to reform is long, and one that is best tackled from all sides. Perhaps it is best not to say, “Here’s what I know,” but to ask the question that neighbors ask each other: “How can I help?”

Design Activism

A Dialogue on Protest, Policing, and Demanding the Future We Need

On February 9, 2021, Niki Franco moderated a conversation with Ivy Climacosa, Dustin Gibson, Annika Hansteen-Izora, and Liz Ogbu around the new protest movements that have arisen in reaction to the ongoing scourge of police brutality in the United States. As designers and activists, the participants were invited to talk about their own creative practices, including, according to Franco, “The relationship between artists, designers, and folks on the ground.” Together, the group addressed the various crises people of color experience in this country, including, “the spatial dynamics that contribute to racism, classism, anti-homelessness, ableism,” and more.

The following is a transcript of their conversation, edited and condensed for clarity and space.

Niki Franco (Miami, FL), Moderator: I’m so grateful to be in conversation with each of y’all. I’m a true believer, in Gemini fashion, that we are most apt to tell our own stories, so I would love to hear a little bit about who you are and what brings you to this space.

Annika Hansteen-Izora (Brooklyn, NY): I use all pronouns. I’m a designer, art director, and a writer. One of my day jobs is as Creative Director of Design and UI at Somewhere Good, which is a soon-to-be-released social platform designed to help people of color connect around the things we love. 

Liz Ogbu (Oakland, CA): She/her. I’m trained as an architect. I probably still do that in some form, shape, or fashion. I describe myself as a designer, urbanist, and spatial justice advocate; and I run a consultancy called Studio O, working at the intersection of racial and social justice, because I think as long as we are separated and selectively harmed by space, we can’t actually achieve racial justice. I work in mostly low-income communities of color all over the world, but specifically here in the U.S., looking for ways to use design to push for justice.

Dustin Gibson (Atlanta, GA): “Who are you?” questions always feel super heavy. I feel like I should start with at least my great-grandmother, [whose] organizing informed the work I do. I’m an abolitionist and that guides the work I do building peer support models for people that are getting out of the asylums and nursing facilities and prisons and jails; and all of the organizing that takes place in between to make that happen.

Ivy Climacosa (Oakland, CA): She pronouns. I’m a worker-owner at Design Action Collective. I’ve been there for a little over 10 years; and prior to that I’ve been organizing in the Filipino community, building grassroots organizations in my community for 15 years or more. So I’ve been in this intersection of organizing and design for a bit and wanting to amplify our spaces to be as equally rich and engaging, and trying to be a resource for folks on the ground to meet the goals of our community.

Intersections of Art and Activism

Niki: I want to start this conversation by grounding us in the non-negotiable relationship between creative producers (artists, cultural workers, designers) and activists (folks on the front lines of social justice, including organizers and even folks that are incarcerated). We know that these two have always existed in tandem and supported one another. During the summer of 2020, in a time when we were not able to share space as easily as we would like, and were looking to our phones, looking to information systems to learn, “What are folks doing? Where am I needed? How do I connect? Where are mutual aid projects?” I think that dynamic was really uplifted. 

In the tradition of Toni Cade Bambara, the role of the artist or cultural worker is to make the revolution irresistible. How are you swimming in that water, trying to be in deeper relationships with folks on the front line and bringing your talents of design and artistry to contribute into this new world?

Ivy: At Design Action Collective, we are in network or in community with other formations like Grassroots Global Justice Alliance and the U. S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives. Locally, we co-founded a space called Third World Resistance, that includes, “people of color community organizations” that are anti-imperialist, that are movement building. We have been a resource ally with the organization to be the cultural arm that creates visuals for campaigns the network wants to move forward or highlight. 

Being in constant community with folks has helped us to see what is really resonant, what needs to be amplified. We’re creating spaces and sharing information, doing workshops, political education with organizers, and asking, “What is effective design? What are the tactics of visual narrative that can really propel our story?” We maximize all this effort when people put their bodies on the line and take space.  

Annika: I also think of being in community with folks. That was very much how I was thinking about the current movements, because when the uprisings occurred, I think it really had folks reckon with the thought that everybody has a way that they can be participating in movement work in their own spaces. At the time I was the Creative Director for Ethel’s Club, which is a social and wellness club for people of color. In that moment we were thinking about, “How can we provide space for people of color to rest, to heal, to engage in pleasure, to be with people that already see them, and not having to be under the white gaze. How can we provide free healing sessions between Black folks and trained therapists and healers?”

As an artist working with design in digital mediums, I was asking, “How can I create resources as someone whose movement work is really rooted in writing, in communal care, in poetry?” I created resources for folks to connect to one another and share resources, to be seen through the power of social media, and actually being able to reach others, to do something. Creating resources is really important and learning is very important, but how can you align that knowledge with action? And what are you doing with that knowledge beyond just seeing an Instagram post giving you information? What are you actually going to do with that? So I focused my work on connecting people to one another.

Liz: What Ivy and Annika said has really spoken to where I feel like I’m operating. I do think that the work that I do often is pushing the envelope, but when we’re talking about what “the revolution” is, There’s a tendency to think that the only useful roles are those who are out on the street, actively fighting in the resistance. If we think about it as an entire ecosystem, we need folks who are doing that and we need the folks who are dreaming for what can happen, and we need the folks who are hanging back a little bit to try and bring the laggards who are slowly waking up. It’s important to figure out what your role or roles are going to be.

I feel like mine somehow operates a little bit in the dreaming of what’s happening next, dreaming of the future. So in some ways the events in the spring and summer were basically like, “All right, I gotta dig deep and start plotting.” When this comes down, we’re going to need something to go to next. We can’t just go to nothing. So that has meant really deepening the anti-racist work that I was doing with communities and envisioning what anti-racist communities look like, I took advantage of speaking gigs to openly say to the design community, in particular, “You can be an actor and be complicit with all of the harm that is horrifying you right now. Or you can be an ally and step up.” Or actually, where I really want to land is, “Become an accomplice and risk something, because there are folks who are dying. There are folks who are suffering and we’re all here comfortable with our signs and our hashtags, but not actually doing anything.” So, a lot of my talks started to get a little bit more aggressive like, “We don’t actually have time to be with the niceties right now.” Like, “shit’s happening, people are dying. Step up.” Trying to shift institutions to actually, literally put their money where their mouth is and change our practices has been calling to me in this time.

Dustin: As you were speaking to Liz, I was thinking about Amiri Baraka, who said we need poems that shoot back and we need poems that kill. A lot of my work is concerned with expanding our understanding of ableism and how the disabled body and mind is central to undoing anti-Blackness and all the other systems that are interconnected with it. And one of the things that we’ve discovered is Black folks in particular have talked about disability in very nuanced and complex ways, but we haven’t necessarily used the Western language to do so. So it typically comes out as, “Hey, Black people need to talk about mental health.” When in reality, if we hadn’t talked about mental health we wouldn’t survive and we wouldn’t be here today. So we utilize the songs of Nina Simone, we utilize Blind Willie Johnson’s records and Meek Mill and J. Cole, and talk about the ways in which we have nuanced and complex understandings of what’s happening to us. 

The role of the artist is not necessarily just concerned with the product. The process in and of itself is a journey and a thing that we pay attention to in disability communities. We’re thinking about access to creative practice. Ruth Wilson Gilmore talks about abolition changing the way we interact with each other and the planet. I view access and interdependence as central to the practice of changing the way we relate to each other. Through that, we build some of the communities that Annika lifts up and Ivy lifts up. Some people have done that beautifully, like Leroy Moore (of KripHop Nation) who uses his voice, the disabled voice, as well as writing  to not only excavate the history of where we’ve been, but to put forth a way of entering into this creation, this practice in a way that is more accessible to folks. And it’s access-centered, meaning that we’re building relationships while doing it.

Niki: Yes, yes. I have deep resonance right now. I feel it in my body.

Liz, thank you for also challenging the binary in which the question was posed. I think of Deepa Iyer from the Building Movement Project who mapped out this beautiful ecosystem of all the roles that go into it social change: guides, storytellers, healers, disruptors, caregivers, builders, visionaries, frontline responders, experimenters, and weavers. We’re so deeply interconnected, but there’s this idea that there’s really only maybe two to four roles that folks can fit themselves in. But that’s not real. 

Y’all brought up so many revolutionaries that exist in our legacies who’ve been embodying this. We know that in order to get to the next stage of where we want our communities to be and how we want them to feel, we need to dream, but we also need to be rooted. We have to have our feet on the ground and our head in the sky, dreaming for something more. We know that we’re not the first ones to think this. Abolition is nothing new; it  runs deep in our legacy.

Healing the Crisis of Imagination 

We know that the carceral state, and all oppressive systems, largely depend on a crisis of imagination. 2020 created ruptures in that lack of imagination in many ways, as folks were asking, “If not this, then what?” So many people were offering visions that actually felt healing, felt rooted in care. When we’re trying to reorient ourselves around  the question of, “What can communities that are safe and supportive look like?” I think of all the roles that we just talked about. All of the ecosystems coming together and aligning to move forward. 

How are you untangling the crisis of imagination in your work?

Ivy: People tend to go back to the same symbolism over and over again, so we’ve been creating our own visual narratives. At the beginning of the pandemic we created a graphic called Solidarity is Safety, defining what safety looks like in our communities, including mutual aid or being able to care for each other. Modeling what it means to dream from a place of abundance and not scarcity, challenges the notion of, “Oh no, we can only dream so little.” 

Liz: Ivy, what you said really spoke to me, and I literally had just written down, “We’ve never seen what it is that we’re heading to, or that we’re dreaming of, but we know what it feels like.” So I think it’s like, how do we get deep into our bodies, and understand that we know the truth, even if we’ve never actually experienced it before, and use that as a little bit of our North Star? For me, it’s leaning into that feeling and not being afraid of it and understanding that, because we have all been nurtured in systems of oppression, that comes second nature to us. The de-programming isn’t just about our institutions and our spaces and our art making. The de-programming is also within us.

Part of the system of oppression is that you don’t get to dream. You just exist in these two states: either you’re being urgent, which is more about an emergency than a critical need to solve; or it’s about forgetting, like getting to a place where you can forget again and be complacent. So, some of the dreaming is asking, “What’s the third way?” We shouldn’t just be aspiring for doing good or good enough. We should be aspiring for what it would be if we were all free. The question in pretty much all of my project teams is,  “What does freedom look like here and how are we participating and keeping that freedom from being achieved?”

In a project that I’ve been working on in Charlottesville for five years, we had been talking about what an anti-racist model of housing would look like. That was well before this year, but it took on a whole new urgency, as the conversation focused on discovering what self-determination for those residents should be, and how we become participants in making sure that they get it. That’s what’s driving us. 

The goal has to be their self-determination, not a new housing development. Every action we do emanates from that. I can’t say I know what self-determination for those residents looks like, but I know what it feels like.  And I know that we’re on this journey to create that liberation. It requires an ability to take risks, which is one of the things that we don’t necessarily talk about as much, that safety is about trust and trust enough to be able to take a risk, whether it’s a risk of a feeling, a risk of an action. How do we build relationships of trust within all of the spaces that we’re making and shaping?

Dustin. Liz, as you’re talking about abundance, I have to mention Elandria Williams, who became an ancestor last year. They wrote a poem called, We Are Worthy, which is about a striving for abundant communities. They were also part of this group that made an anti-capitalist curriculum that included a section called Beautiful Solutions with a hundred examples of solidarity economies across the globe, like Alaska Permanent Fund, or examples of people buying trailer parks or different co-ops that have been organized. And that’s a really useful tool to, 1) know these things are possible and they exist, and 2) think about the amount of accommodations that have taken place and transpired during the pandemic. These are things and demands that disabled people have been making for decades. Some people died behind it. People have struggled for it. And because we’re in this moment where we’re trying to figure out how to continue the level of production for capitalist systems, we will begin to accommodate people for that. 

So I raised that poem as a way of restructuring how we believe we’re valued in society, right? Capitalism intrinsically ties our value to what we can produce for a master, essentially. But for us, it has to be different. The group, Us Protecting Us that I’m part of in Atlanta, is where disabled and non-disabled people are coming together to organize around, “How do we respond to the crisis in our community?” Just on Saturday we had more people join. And one of the things that somebody mentioned was, “Hey, I had a positive experience with the officer. They came up to me when I was in crisis and they didn’t pull a gun.” Like, that’s a very real value set that we have. I mean, we’ve been socialized this way, right? Programmed. But that’s something that we as organizers or folks that are concerned with this have to figure out ways to respond to. And I think that’s the heart of the question, the lack of imagination.

I’m really inspired by folks that, in a very visible way, have been stripped of not only resources, but also all of the reasons to imagine and still create things. Like, I’m thinking about Todd who was a prisoner in Pennsylvania who paints on leaves. And he paints on leaves because that’s one of the materials or mediums that he has access to, but his paintings didn’t tell the story of the seasons, the places in Pennsylvania that he’s gone to. [His paintings] talk about the separation of family and moving all across the state for different political reasons and whatnot. But those types of things, like, the idea that we could actually build with what we have is really important to how we imagine things. I at least have experienced a lot of meetings where we start off by saying, “What do we need? Who else do we need in the room? Where can we go and get XYZ?” But it feels like we have a lot of tools at our disposal already and we can build from where we are.

Annika:  I really appreciate, Liz ,what you were saying about calling in a world that we can’t see, because I feel like a part of untangling the crisis of imagination is actually insisting on the potential for new futures. I’m here because I’m the beneficiary of the imagination of Black, trans, queer, and disabled elders. And I think about how they were dreaming of and fighting for a world that they knew that they wouldn’t even see, necessarily, that they might not see the outcome of. 

In my own art, I’m creating for a world that I will not see, and yet I still believe in the potential of that world to be pulled into the present. Saidiya Hartman said, “So much of the work of oppression is policing the imagination.” In design, white supremacy ends up manifesting in the discourses and texts and institutions that are heralded as, “This is what design is,” that are often assuming who the audience is: not only white, but white and well off, and white and heterosexual and cis-gendered and able-bodied. 

We see the results of that in imagination. Untangling that starts with challenging assumptions in pretty much everything I can think of, especially, in creating systems of care and thinking about how we can be supporting each other in this work. 

Designing the Demands and Politics of Space

Niki: I want to talk a little bit about space. As designers, organizers, urbanists, y’all are constantly thinking about space. In my own reflections from 2020, I began thinking a lot about spatial politics, considering questions like, who’s on the street? Who has to sleep in the rain?  I began thinking about the power of thousands of young people of color blocking a key highway in Miami, Florida, and incarcerated folks organizing from the inside to be in solidarity with the folks that were outside of that building; making noise with pots and pans or whatever they were able to get to and letting folks know, “We are here and thank you for seeing us.”

How are you negotiating spatial politics in your work, including negotiating questions of access, and challenging norms that are inherently classist, ableist, and anti-Black?

Dustin: There’s an article that Robert “Saleem” Holbrook wrote while he was in solitary confinement called, “Control Units: High Tech Brutality,” and in it he referenced Dr. Mutulu Shakur, who talks about solitary being designed as a device of deprivation. The work of freedom is attempting to destroy all notions of us not being interdependent with each other, right? Not this idea of American exceptionalism where we can be independent, but us being able to be together. However that is, even on Zoom. . . and this is important . . . Zoom has been shutting down pro-BDS and pro-Palestinian gatherings online. So even in this place, we’re policed.

Thinking about all the ways we can be together is important to me. Judith Butler writes a bit about modes of participation—the right to assemble and to gather that is essential to being a part of any type of democracy. A lot of disabled folks can’t gather in spaces because they’re inaccessible. Trans folks can’t gather in public because it is something that society is not okay with. Women are not able to walk down the streets safely. So there’s a bunch of reasons why we can’t assemble. The protection and the struggle to be able to do that feels very central to our politics, because in order to progress, we have to be able to deliberate and come together and talk; and not just talk, but communicate in all of the ways. 

Liz: What you said about interdependence is really interesting, because I think that the spaces that we’re in for the most part are defined by the normalcy of whiteness, right? That undergirds the terms and conditions of what we consider good space versus what is bad space.  And how I was trained—architecture education—is intimately steeped in white supremacy. So I was trained to be a great white supremacist. It’s an active act to break away from that and question it; and part of the questioning and part of that road means that I have to look at who’s not included, whose stories are being left out, who was I taught not to see, and understanding that my ability to exist in this place has to be deeply interwoven to those who the system has said are invisible.

That means that I always have to see them. I always have to bring them to the table. I always have to try to see the world through their eyes because it’s the exact opposite of what I was taught. You know, I grew up in Oakland. I live in Oakland. I’ve seen it go through a lot of changes. Increasingly, who is perceived to be invisible by the systems, determining the space, it just hurts, right? Like the encampments that you see underneath the freeway, even in the time of COVID with all the restaurants, and the outdoor dining, and stuff like that. I’m just sort of like, there are so many people who are not seen by this, whether it’s the homeless person who you’ve cleared out so there can be free walking space for the people who are coming to patronize the restaurants or the disabled person who literally cannot see the crosswalk. I can barely see the crosswalk in between all of these things that have been set up so that people who want to eat outside in the time of COVID can do so. 

It’s not a new thing that we have existed in a world that is about not seeing other people’s humanity as the normal part of existing. But I think right now it feels even harder because not seeing humanity is literally leading to massive death. The key to re-scrambling our relationship with space is getting to the place where we understand what it means to see the people that we have ignored or rendered invisible before.

Annika: When I think about urban space . . .  I’m from East Palo Alto, California and Portland, Oregon. Portland is already so white that people wouldn’t think that it could be gentrified, and yet, it has one of the worst gentrification rates because of how violently it came through the Black community of Portland, and completely uprooted that community, and instantiated its idea of what a neat and orderly and nice design space can look like. Rapidly gentrified urban centers have a design look. We know what that look is. There is the gentrifier font, which is like, if you see a sans-serif sign go up in a neighborhood, then you know that it is about to uproot an entire community that has been there before. The “universal” type of design in these neighborhoods, in an attempt to make them nicer, ends up recreating systems of domination. 

Ivy: As an immigrant, I think it’s been this lifelong struggle to be like,  “How can we take space in the communities that we inhabit.” I used to work in the South of Market area in San Francisco, this mecca of technology, right? It’s such hot real estate for people to take over neighborhoods. It also happens to be one of the highest concentrations of Filipino immigrants who had come with families and shacked up in small apartments together for years. Some of my friends applied for it to be a heritage neighborhood. They were able to advocate for the Filipino community to have a space, to say that we’ve been here for a long time, we’ve contributed to making this community vibrant. Our neighborhoods, our cities are supposed to reflect the people that have built it up. So how do we take up space? I think a lot of it is also how do we heal our communities to feel like it’s okay to advocate for these things. 

Dustin: There’s this level of absurdity around the murders of Natasha McKenna and Janice Dotson-Stephens—people who were existing in public in a way that was deemed inappropriate. We have a long lineage of that, right? I mean this colonial project of the U.S.; we have ugly laws and public charges and Black codes and all of these ways in which we’re not only policing “who” but “how people can behave.” 

The power in what happened in St. Louis in 2014, when people were saying, “Who’s streets?” That brought so many people into the movement? I think a part of that was, whether it’s subconsciously or consciously, understanding that they’re doing that shit in our name, right? That jail? They built that in our name. That prison? They built that in our name. Right? These are all supposedly public institutions. And that is ours. The streets are ours—thinking about colonized peoples, specifically. The design of that is hidden in plain sight. So the jails damn near every downtown, any county jail, you don’t even notice a jail unless you’re from there. In Pittsburgh, the kid jail is hidden by trees so you can’t see it even though you’re 200 yards away. That’s designed purposely. The prisons or institutions are typically geographically dislocated from communities. 

The deinstitutionalization movement [of the 1960s] sent hundreds of thousands of people out of asylums, state schools, and hospitals, into different forms of institutions. Group homes and halfway houses look like houses or apartment buildings, but if you go in there are padlocks everywhere, plexiglass, very little furniture, 24/7 surveillance. The question is, “Are they free or not?” 

In St. Louis last weekend, [more than 100] prisoners in what they call the Justice Center, downtown in jail, broke open the door and started lighting shit on fire, holding up signs that said, “Free 57.” They were trying to bring attention to the 57 people being held in solitary confinement—and right across the street, people are having beers and pretzels. 

In 2015, 2016, when healthcare was getting voted on, and they were trying to destroy Obamacare, disabled people protesting in power chairs and wheelchairs were getting ripped out of congressional buildings.  They designed that protest in a way that was literally putting their chairs and their bodies on the front lines. Those are moments that should shock society into thinking about a new world.

Annika: Thinking about how we take up space in digital realms, facial recognition technology has been used to  identify suspects in policing. But as former Google AI researcher Timnit Gebru [who was scandalously fired in December 2020] discovered, Black faces, faces with melanin, are not recognized by facial recognition. That’s the technology used by police systems to incriminate more Black people, and it literally can’t see us. 

Liz: What does it take for somebody to feel safe? In built spaces, there’s the entity overseeing policy or management that sees safety as professionalized security companies and systems. But it’s important to disrupt that dynamic. Safety is about who people are in relationship with; who do they care for or feel cared by; and making sure that it’s not just receiving, but it’s also giving. In a lot of the communities that I work with, it’s like, “How do we better connect you?” Once you do that, you create conditions of stewardship and interdependence. We don’t need to be dependent on control to enforce it. 

Niki: One of the interesting points is we barely have to say the term “policing” in this entire conversation, because we understand that policing, the carceral state or police state that we live under manifests in so many subtle, overt, visceral, and imaginative ways. One of my own commitments this year is challenging what folks think abolition is challenging in the first place. We’re not just talking about cages, police, and jails. We’re talking about how forms of policing show up everywhere in our lives.

Assata Shakur said, “We have nothing to lose, but our chains.” We’re in that juncture right now. 

Sowing Seeds of Change

Niki: We’ve talked about a lot of harsh and violent systems, and shared experiences around how they impact our lives and the lives of those that we love and folks that we’re in solidarity with. But I also believe that in times of crisis and rupture, there’s always opportunity. 2020 definitely showed us that. And 2020 is over as a year but the crisis goes on. So what seeds are you sowing in this time of ongoing struggle? And what does dreaming actually look like for you right now? 

Annika: I love this question so much, Niki. I feel like my dreaming right now is really just seeing this not as this far-off fantasy, although maybe it is far off, but not seeing these ideas of what can exist beyond white supremacy as something that will never be, but as something that’s well within reach, and how I can be stretching toward other people’s dreams. Not seeing my hopes as these individual, protected things that I have to keep secret, but how I can be communally reaching toward other people in ways that are authentic, and that are actually calling in change.  Trinh T. Minh-ha wrote this really beautiful work asking, “how can we recreate without recirculating domination?”

So my dreaming is about, “what does that creation look like, and how can I be bringing other people along with me?” A lot of it is about healing, and really slowly and sustainably and intentionally, because I think slow and sustainable is very against everything that the capitalist systems we’re in preach. I am dreaming about how I can really slowly and sustainably reach toward other people’s dreams and heal this past trauma, which ends up being individual and then stretches toward the communal. 

Liz: I love that. I find so much resonance with it. Arundhati Roy wrote this great piece at the beginning of this summer called, The Pandemic is a Portal, about the idea that normal didn’t work for any of us before this and we all kind of made do with it, because it seemed like, well, we’ve got what we’ve got and we’re just pushing against that. But this idea that within this, there’s a space to break from the normal, to see the critical harm of the normal, and to finally break free and say that it’s not about a return to that, because none of us benefited from it, and it harmed all of us.

The work that I was doing pre-pandemic continues with renewed vigor, but there’s a way of coming to terms with how, even in the work that I’m doing or have been doing, there’s still a complicity with the harm that I’ve done just by virtue of not fully de-programming myself of the ways in which I embody white supremacy. There’s an individual journey of understanding what that means, which could be as simple as, it’s okay for me to rest. Or, I don’t have to define success on these terms. Right? I can’t fully break the complicity and harm out in the world unless I also break it within myself. So there’s a big seed of nurturing around that. 

Out in the world, I feel like the systems of oppression are dying an ugly death, but they’re dying. And so I’m looking at what it means to guide that death and to help support and protect the communities that have been most harmed by the system and are actually still being the most harmed as this thing is dying. And then dreaming of what’s beyond, what we can’t see, but we can feel. I’ve been trying to trust myself more to feel into that future and to feel into it with others. I really do believe that this interdependence and care are the foundations of whatever it is that we’re heading toward. So I’m constantly challenging myself to lean into that as much as possible as I take each step into what’s coming next.

Ivy: I’ve been spending a lot of time in nature—being inspired by the whole mycelium network—you may not see it above ground, but there’s a whole network or system that’s feeding all the plants, all the trees, and being able to send resources or nutrition through that network. Finding inspiration with that has been very helpful, and understanding that we are part of a legacy of our ancestors that has also nourished us. For the folks that have been doing this work for a long time, we are part of this longer arc of transformation. I’m excited to be a part of that network, of cheerleading other folks that are also doing the work, and cultivating my own connection to ancestors—this asset I always had that is just now becoming more and more apparent. Being able to thrive in a pandemic is such a feat. So that’s my dreaming.

Dustin.  I don’t have a lot of hope for the situation we’re in. I think we’re in dire straits, and it could get worse unless we do something about it. The work of disability justice is not only a moral guide or a moral compass, but also very pragmatic. It’s about expanding and growing our movements, our capacity to bring more people in, and I think we need that right now. I think we need more polarization. We need more people to say we’re anti-fascists and to actually struggle against the state and corporations, but to do that, we have to have places for people to plug in.

Access is central to the way we organize and gather. Mariame Kaba says, “Let this moment radicalize you rather than bring you to despair.” I just come back to that a lot. I don’t have any poetic or deep words for it, but I think it’s just enough to say what is calling on us right now. Ivy brought up, just, the pace. So what I’m doing right now is what I was doing before, but just more intense, thinking about the pace in which we move, for whatever reason that we’re moving. And attempting to operate as if no one’s going to be left behind.

In operating that way, it is running counter to all of what white supremacy tells me is urgent, whether it’s fast food, fast fashion, eight-hour work days, whatever that is. I think about enslaved folks being on plantations together and singing a song to the same rhythm. Nobody is over-producing and nobody is under-producing, and everyone is ensuring that there’s going to be no punishment at the end of the day, because everybody’s moving at the same pace and trying to find ways to do that in every aspect of life. So my focus is pacing and ensuring that nobody’s left behind. Because we need all of us, as many of us as we can get.

Niki: Thank you for sharing all of those hopes and longings. I want to close this off with a thought from Ruth Wilson Gilmore that I think articulates what each of you is up to. She reminds us that, “Abolition is not about absence, but rather the presence of life-affirming institutions.” I think all of y’all are up to bringing those life affirming networks into fruition. 

Abolish the Cop Inside Your (Designer’s) Head 

Unraveling the Links Between Design and Policing

American policing has always faced crises: of legitimacy, of efficacy, of budgeting, of racist discrimination, and of heinous violence. Over the last year, radical calls to defund, disarm, and disband police departments drowned out the historically widely-accepted explanations of these crises. Black women have always led these calls, but in 2020 much of the U.S. public heard them for the first time.

Illustration by Lamees Rahman

By Sarah Fathallah and A.D. Sean Lewis

We see three main connections between design and policing. First, design creates the tools and products of policing. Designers created every stun gun, detention facility, and data dashboard that police use. Second, policing uses the tools of design thinking to legitimize itself, particularly by focusing on user experience and procedural justice. Third, design and policing both rely on and reproduce the same ideologies. This leads us to wonder whether design and policing lead to similar outcomes. From our perspective, both design and policing rely on creating “professionals” who then determine what social metrics to surveil, analyze, and change. Those making decisions are neither accountable for nor impacted by their actions’ outcomes on the targeted communities.

We urge designers, especially designers who seek to build a world without policing and cages, to adopt a praxis of Abolitionist Design. To do so, we have three recommendations. One, designers must refuse to design policing tools and should prohibit their work from ever being used for policing’s ends. Two, designers should resist and push back against the appropriation of design methods and discourse for policing’s ends. Three, designers must develop their knowledge and discernment of policing ideologies, and in turn, of abolitionist ones. Designers should fight to abolish literal cops and the ones in their heads. Freedom demands that, and nothing less.

When Design Works in Service of Policing

Designers play an important role in creating, building, and making the world we live in. This necessarily includes policing, law enforcement, and the criminal penal system. Designers, alongside engineers and product managers, developed intuitive digital infrastructure for law enforcement databases, created ergonomic weapons and armor, constructed efficient carceral facilities, developed user-friendly training for law enforcement, and designed well-composed police branding and insignia. This labor is actively designing for policing, for its people, its tools, its infrastructure, and its systems.

How Policing Uses Design to Legitimize Itself

In researching relationships between design firms and academic institutions with law enforcement agencies in recent years, we learned that many projects have focused on fostering “interpersonal listening” and “meaningful discussion,” building trust between police and communities, managing “citizen expectations,” or enhancing “the general public’s positive perceptions of the police.” These designers seem to understand policing’s most pressing problem as a user experience issue. Translated to the policing context, the designers focus our attention on “community engagement strategies” and “enhancing public trust.”

But these design interventions are a symptom of something bigger. They are symptoms of how policing has adopted the tools of design (user experience-focused interventions, focus groups, branding, etc.) to legitimize itself. Policing’s central issue is its perception, not what it results in (incarceration, inequality, less safety).

Designers are helping police shift public attention away from calls to defund, dis-arm, and abolish, and instead toward improving the public’s perception of police. The most salient example is the push for “procedural justice,” a term coined by academics to describe how the public perceives the fairness of policing regardless of outcomes, that is, how they perceive the justness of the procedure. Academics and designers have developed metrics, implemented implicit bias trainings to teach officers how their unconscious thoughts can impact their behavior, and offered procedural justice trainings to emphasize the importance of interpersonal courtesy and explaining why the officer is taking certain actions.

These interventions are intended to improve public relations and enhance police legitimacy. None of them limit the use of force, reduce instances of police violence, or address the negative social outcomes of policing. None alter the structural conditions that lead to surveillance, over-policing, racialized policing practices, excessive force, profiling, and so many other horrors of policing. Cynically, these interventions seem to be aimed to pro-duce a more compliant, accepting public who will still obey when ordered and trade privacy for the false promises of “public safety.”
In addition to focusing on user experience, police have adopted the tools of design thinking to invest in the apparatus and appearance of re-positioning policing over fundamental structural change. Legal academics refer to this dynamic as “preservation through trans-formation:” hegemonic power structures, like the law and police, will change just enough to preserve themselves as an institution; no more and no less.

What Design and Policing Have in Common

Understanding how policing’s logics and ideologies have burrowed their way into design practices presents a more nuanced, pernicious question, but the answer is clear. Designers should not only stop designing for policing, but they also need to understand and resist using the ideologies of policing in designing everything else.

Critical Resistance, a leading organization in abolitionist praxis, describes policing in broad terms. Their definition is as follows: “Policing is, in its very nature, in opposition to self-determination. The practices of watching, questioning, intimidating, and arresting people through the use of force are violent practices. Not only do cops use threats of violence—the guns on their hips, the clubs on their belts—to control people, they often use force in making stops, inquiries, and arrests. Harassment of people on the street or ‘stop and frisk’ practices—stopping people to frisk them for drugs or weapons—are tools often used to intimidate, monitor, and control poor people and people of color. While we’re told the police are on the street to stop or solve ‘crime,’ their very presence is a way of enforcing social control, and actually creates more violence.”

When we talk about policing, we do not limit our understanding to officers’ daily tasks (e.g., drive around in cars, write reports, process individuals in custody, use force, etc.). For us, “policing” necessarily includes the various ideologies that enforce social control, limit freedom and agency, and protect the nation-state and private property.

When we studied policing’s ideologies and logics, we began to notice eerily similar philosophies in design’s ethos and practices. Empathy, for instance, has always been a core tenet of design and design thinking. Many designers believe that empathy is what allows some individuals, who are removed from a challenge, to solve said challenge while remaining “user centered.” It absolves design professionals of the responsibility to center lived experience, as they can “walk a mile in the shoes” of others. Poorly designed products and services can then be explained as an outcome of lack of empathy, rather than the inability of design professionals to do the work of community building that allows them to be trusted by and in service of those their designs should serve.

Designers should not only stop designing for policing, but they also need to understand and resist using the ideologies of policing in designing everything else.

Recently, many law enforcement agencies have adopted tactics that appear to be rooted in this design thinking-version of empathy. Police efforts have included facilitating individual “ride alongs,” hosting community meetings, pushing for individual conversations between officers and community members, and using virtual reality to help non-officers empathize with the difficult choices officers face. These efforts frame policing’s problem as a lack of empathy from police and community alike. But this is incorrect. Communities’ lack of trust stems from the current and historical realities of policing, including routine violence, discrimination, criminalization of poverty, and sexual harassment and assault. Policing contributes to, rather than solves, these entrenched problems.

Empathy is just one example of how policing ideologies are shared by the discipline and practice of design. There are many others. In the following table, we summarize some of these ideologies and describe how policing and design both use and reproduce them.

Commodification of Rights 

Design

In the design of many products, privacy is commodified as a luxury good rather than a basic right. Able consumers can purchase privacy-friendly features, such as the option to export their data or the ability to auto-delete data after a certain time, or buy their way out of having to see advertisements by paying a premium. Research shows that even the act of reading all of the privacy policies to which one is exposed online would take the average adult 76 working days per year, the equivalent of a $781 billion opportunity cost to the U.S. market. (17) As Sarah T. Hamid put it, privacy is “less like a design value, and more like a luxury demand.” (18)

Policing

Policing and the criminal legal system often require money for freedom, even absent criminal convictions. Cash bail and bail-bondsmen literally put a dollar amount on freedom, effectively making jails debtors’ prisons. (14) Similarly, policing targets non-criminal behavior (drinking in public) and low-level crimes (“graffiti, public urination, panhandling, littering, and unlicensed street vending”) in public spaces. (15) Policing criminalizes individuals for simply existing, or being poor, in public. Finally, once ensnared in the criminal penal system, individuals find that poverty becomes nearly impossible to escape. (16)

Discrimination

Design

Discriminatory design practices take many forms, including determining who is worthy to design for based on their race, class, consumption ability, or other characteristics. For instance, “hostile architecture” is an intentional design practice to keep unhoused people out of public space. These practices literally install bolts and spikes on surfaces and steps and place intermittent armrests on public benches. (20) Discrimination in design extends to a wide range of products and services, from optical heart rate monitors (21) to the design of bus systems, railways, and other forms of public transportation. (22) More recently, discriminatory design was described as the “New Jim Code,” with tech designers encoding biases and inequity into technical systems. (23) 

Policing

At the local level, “discriminatory” policing defines policing. Stopping “suspicious” people, pulling over “unfamiliar” cars in the neighborhood, and ticketing car drivers for broken tail lights. Discrimination is legally protected through relying on officer discretion; the law permits officers to determine “where to patrol, when to use force, who to arrest, who to kill or let live”19 based on how judges interpret the law. The criminal legal system, including judges, is deferential towards officer discretion. At the national level, discriminatory law enforcement looks like Muslim-targeted screenings at airports, surveillance of Black activists, gendered body scans that out trans individuals, and the failure to reckon with the links between white supremacist violence and policing. 

Disposability and Extraction (24)

Design

In design research, “subjects” are useful as long as designers are able to extract knowledge, insight, or social capital from them, and are quickly disposed of once their value is no longer of use. Even when designers attempt to facilitate processes with research or user testing participants in inclusive, democratic, or participatory ways, design processes remain by and large extractive to communities. (27) 

Policing

Policing sacrifices bodies in the name of public safety. By targeting those who exist, but don’t or can’t contribute to capitalism in public, policing deems some individuals as worthy of displacement and disappearance. (25) One salient example is the routine criminalization of unhoused encampments while cities have rushed to build outdoor eating tents during the COVID-19 pandemic. Another example is when police seize and sell belongings prior to conviction through a process called “asset forfeiture.” The proceedings from the sales go back into police budgets, allowing them to purchase more weapons or to hire more cops. (26)

Domination

Design

Designers yield a lot of power. They hold the key to methodology and solutions including ownership of the process, authorship, access to people, to information, the ability to assign validity, value, and accountability. (30) Through these modes of power, designers control research and design outcomes. As “process experts,” designers are centered as the main agents in the act of designing. (31) Designers often act as de facto gatekeepers for deciding what meanings are included, connections are drawn, and knowledge is produced. Designers exert power in producing and limiting knowledge based on what they view as significant or practicable.

Policing

Many police have seen themselves as “warriors” or as “guardians.” (28) Both metaphors rely on how police exert power over others. The state permits officers to determine whether to arrest an individual, to transport them for booking, or to subject them to invasive searches. Police are “experts” when exercising discretion, like when acting on “hunches” or identifying “suspicious behavior.” Additionally, police use of force policies always permit police to use a greater level of force. This means that police are always permitted a greater level of legal protection than civilians, even when off-duty. (29)

Empathy

Design

Empathy is a word commonly used to describe the initial phase of the design process, in which designers seek to understand their intended users in order to inform subsequent design decisions. Designers have been taught that they can perform acts of empathy, such as suggesting that a designer can learn about the disabled experience by walking around blindfolded or on crutches, instead of centering the lived experiences of people with disabilities. (35) The concept of empathy has been bastardized so much that rarely do designers actually willfully surrender power in order to be empathetic. (36)

Policing

Mainstream media focuses on how cops are “expected” to do the work of a social worker, parent, teacher, etc., in an attempt to induce us to empathize with the difficulties of being a cop. (32) Even police departments emphasize that civilians lack empathy for or understanding of police. (33) They encourage citizens to use virtual reality headsets to walk in the shoes of a cop, to attend “police academies,” or go for “ride alongs.” (34) But that focus is asymmetrical. Media and law enforcement departments seldom express empathy for those shot and murdered by police, for their families, or for their communities. 

Incrementalism 

Design

By and large, design is mostly concerned with tinkering with and attempting to “fix” products and services, often without questioning the systemic and structural conditions surrounding them. Some argue that the main problem with design is that it’s incrementalist at its core. Even when you probe “designers’ understanding of innovation and creativity,” they “are often entangled with the reproduction of the (capitalist and colonial) status quo.” (38)

Policing

The history of modern policing is defined by reformism and incrementalism. Many police departments have adopted “professional” approaches, including requiring training and/or higher education degrees, creating internal policies, and creating independent civilian review groups. But none of this has changed the basic role of law enforcement in the United States: to protect private property and to enforce racial capitalism. (37)

Individualism

Design

Designers focus on individual actions and behaviors, and often fail to consider how structural conditions (e.g., anti-Blackness, poverty, and many -isms) shape and constrain people’s affective responses and decision making. This results in many designers rendering problems as merely technical or aesthetic issues, even when they result from social, economic, and environmental systems. Design is “limited by [its] myopic focus on technological innovation and failure to address political power dynamics.” (40) This failure reproduces the structural conditions it claims to address. As such, design “functions as symbolic violence when it is involved with the creation and reproduction of ideas, practices, products and tools that result in structural and other types of violence.” (41)

Policing

Policing claims to focus on individual interactions and exchanges. Policing says it asks whether an individual meets the criteria to be arrested at that moment. Policing’s individualism is rooted in neoliberalism, namely the idea that social problems result from failures of individual responsibility and morality, rather than wider social structures and collective action. This promotes a moralistic division between the deserving and undeserving. (39) In focusing on individual interactions, policing is able to frame police brutality and murder individual issues to solve (or reform). But policing itself is a form of violence, and violence is a fixture of policing, not a glitch in its system. 

Myth of Objectivity

Design

“Everything we make is subjective and designs can therefore never be neutral, global, universal.” (43) As much as design’s neutrality and universality is a myth, so is the idea that designers are impartial, trained to be fair and objective. First, design projects and solutions are shaped by political agendas and human biases. Second, designers are also not neutral observers mediating the distance and interaction between clients/partners and communities. Third, designers often fall back on being “client-centered,” which distances them from being accountable for the impact of their work on communities.

Policing

Police use technology, data, and the guise of scientific inquiry to support their claims that they are objective and efficacious in addressing crime. (42) Police use “predictive” policing models and basic statistical methods to deploy resources. But both rely on historical “crime data,” or what we should more critically view as historical criminalization data. The data measure the rate of criminalization historically, not the existence of violence or harm historically. Thus, current police leaders will claim that they are “objective” when the data reflect historical, racist norms of previous decades.

Surveillance

Design

Designers have created deeply invasive products by embedding tracking and surveilling features. Increasingly, consumers buy smart devices with cameras, thermostats, virtual assistants, and microphones. These trends continue even when tech companies are known to surveil consumers and then harvest, manipulate, and sell the collected private data. Even in public, we are subjected to surveillance. Examples include private and public security cameras, facial recognition software, DNA and biometric databases, acoustic gunshot detection, drones, electronic monitoring, and risk profiling algorithms. All of these designs are invested in “the control, coercion, capture, and exile of entire categories of people.” (46)

Policing

After 9/11, the federal government greatly expanded the powers of law enforcement and local police to surveil, monitor, and access records of private denizens. (44) Police have state and federal databases at their disposal and can search with little oversight. Judges, too, often sign search warrants, even when the application lacks legally required, accurate information. In short, police can and do access massive amounts of information. Communities subject to police surveillance “are much more likely to produce more bodies for the punishment industry.” (45)

White Supremacy Culture

Design

The mental models of design continue to privilege white, Western, European, post-colonial, post-imperialist frameworks, norms, and cultural expressions. This led some to posit that design and design thinking protect white supremacy (50) by perpetuating characteristics of white supremacy culture. These characteristics include perfectionism, a sense of urgency, defensiveness, valuing quantity over quality, worship of the written word, belief in only one right way, paternalism, either/or thinking, power hoarding, fear of open conflict, individualism, belief that “I’m the only one who can do this right,” belief that progress is bigger and more, belief in objectivity, and claiming a right to comfort. (51) Others have extended this analysis and argued that design thinking and its modernist roots are merely a rebrand for white supremacy. (52)

Policing

Race and socioeconomic class shape definitions of criminality and practices of criminalization. (47) This is especially true for survival crimes, like petty theft and sex work. It is also uniquely apt to describe disparate, anti-Black sentencing rates or the lack of care Black rape survivors are provided. As law professor Monica Bell explains, Black Americans are subjected to, but not protected by, the law.48 Additionally, given the existence and growth of the racialized wealth gap, policing protects white-owned property interests and white comfort over Black lives. Moreover, many members of law enforcement and the military are members in white supremacist hate groups and armed militias. (49) 

Toward an Abolitionist Design Praxis

Designing an abolitionist future is no small task, but it is the most important one we have. Abolition not only requires that we literally abolish policing everywhere, but that we create local, responsive, community-led alternatives that will make policing obsolete. Many alternatives already exist and provide critical reminders of the endless possibilities and potential sites of resistance that an abolitionist praxis offers.

While disbanding law enforcement is necessary for abolitionist futures, abolition requires that we all participate in creating and proliferating alternatives to the systems that harm us. Some of our favorite activists described abolition as “not some distant future but something we create in every moment when we say no to the traps of empire and yes to the nourishing possibilities dreamed of and practiced by our ancestors and friends. Every time we insist on accessible and affirming healthcare, safe and quality education, meaningful and secure employment, loving and healing relation-ships, and being our full and whole selves, we are doing abolition. Abolition is about breaking down things that oppress and building up things that nourish. Abolition is the practice of transformation in the here and now and the ever after.”

Yes, we literally want designers to refuse to work for prisons, cops, ICE, immigration detention, the military, and on all the products, services, technologies, and built environments used by policing. We don’t need any more ergonomic handcuffs or more efficient body cams. Designers must also stop producing and amplifying copaganda, defined as “the reproduction and circulation in main-stream media of propaganda that is favorable to law enforcement.”

But we also need designers to recognize the ideologies of policing in their own work and seek to undo them, and develop a resistance-oriented praxis, in an attempt to figure out “how design can be infused with a more explicit sense of politics—a radical politics—[as] one of the most important questions critical theory can pose to design practice.” Here are some ways to start building an Abolitionist Design praxis:

• Learn about police and prison industrial complex abolition. Study with friends and peers, and get involved in fights against expanding police, incarceration, and surveillance. Get involved in mutual aid.

• Center de-colonial practices, disability justice (nothing about us without us), and anti-racism in your work.

• Seek to improve the material conditions of the communities you work with. Ensure that everyone is getting something from the work, including paying participants. Build this into every project proposal and budget.

• Research the parties and stakeholders you are working with. Understand what motivations they have and what they’re getting out of working with you. Determine whether the project ultimately seeks to recuperate or prop up systems that are ultimately harmful to the most marginalized. Avoid legitimizing state-sanctioned violence.

• Challenge the myth that designers are neutral, objective agents. Practice critical self-reflexivity to examine your power, assumptions, and the ways in which your values, identities, and positionality affect your work and your relationship with communities. Make it a continuous and ever-evolving practice.

• Invest in relationship building with and be in service of communities. Work in solidarity with and amplify the power of community-based organizations. Counter dominance behaviors embedded in design “expertise” and practice non-hierarchical ways of working.

• Resist essentialism, focus on the structural conditions. Fight back against essentialist notions that say, for example, poor people, Black people, young men, etc., commit more crimes. Draw attention to how certain sets of practices result in the criminalization of Black people, poor people, people with disabilities, undocumented people, sex workers, and gender non-conforming people. The state focuses enforcement on these populations, resulting in cycles of poverty and targeted policing.

• Normalize balancing individual, specific stories and structural realities. Frame design research findings with statements about how things are, including information about the racialized wealth gap, the gendered and racialized pay gap, public health disparities, and state involvement in communities.

• Develop your capacity to identify and resist logics of splitting up groups of people into categories of deserving and undeserving. For example, don’t require participants to be sober, have a stable address, or present in gender-conforming ways to be able to access life affirming products and services.

• Work in coalition with or join groups that organize against carceral and surveilling technologies like facial recognition. Fight for abolitionist futures, data sovereignty, and community self-governance when it comes to technology. Such groups include the Carceral Tech Resistance Network,63 Color Coded LA, May First, and the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition.

• Develop a set of abolitionist criteria against which to assess whether you should
offer your labor to certain organizations or engagements. Look at examples of criteria developed by critical thinkers for inspiration. Some questions could include: Does the work reduce the scale of policing? Does it challenge the notion that police increase safety? Does it decrease resources available to police?

Ultimately, this is about recognizing the limitations of design, and when to advocate for not using design altogether. Rachel Herzing, a co-founder of Critical Resistance, states, “If one sees policing for what it is—a set of practices sanctioned by the state to enforce law and maintain social control and cultural hegemony through the use of force—one may more easily recognize that perhaps the goal should not be to improve how policing functions but to reduce its role in our lives.”

Herzing’s wise words leave us with one question. If we see design for what it was set out to be—a set of capitalistic practices that assert consumerist and dominance behaviors through turning the innate human ability to inquire, problem solve, and create into a specialized and inaccessible practice—at what point should we stop trying to improve design and instead reduce its role in our lives? 

(1) Caroline Haskins, Revealed: This Is Palantir’s Top-Secret User Manual for Cops, Vice, 2019.

(2) SI Staff, A History of Ergonomics in Firearm Design, Shooting Illustrated, 2019.

(3) Ian Reeves, Facility Design for Community Engagement, Police Chief Magazine, n.d.

(4) Theo Inglis, The CIA Has Always Understood the Power of Graphic Design, AIGA Eye on Design, 2021.

(5) IDEO, Sparking a Conversation Around Policing in NYC, 2017.

(6) ArtCenter, Building Trust, Bridging Divides: Designing for the Long Beach PD and Community, n.d.

(7) Service Design Network, Fjord: Developing a Police Force’s Digital Experience for Citizens, 2018.

(8) Bente Moen, Jarle Fosse, and Arild Berg, Increasing Police Trustworthiness Through A User-Oriented Design Approach, International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education, 2014.

(9) Jim Gordon, How to Use Design Thinking to Address Critical Issues in Policing, Police1, 2019.

(10) Tracey Meares, Policing and Procedural Justice: Shaping Citizens’ Identities to Increase Democratic Participation, Northwestern University Law Review, 2017. 

(11) One of the co-authors, A.D. Lewis, attended multiple Procedural Justice and Implicit Bias trainings offered by the Chicago Police Department from 2015 to 2018, when he worked for the City of Chicago’s oversight agencies. 

(12) Reva Siegel, Why Equal Protection No Longer Protects: The Evolving Forms of Status-Enforcing State Action, Stanford Law Review, 1997.

(13) Critical Resistance, On Policing, 2009.

(14) Chicago Community Bond Fund, Advocacy, n.d. 

(15) Incite! Women of Color Against Violence, Quality of Life Policing, n.d. 

(16) Human Rights Watch, US: Criminal Justice System Fuels Poverty Cycle, 2018. 

(17) Alexis C. Madrigal, Reading the Privacy Policies You Encounter in a Year Would Take 76 Work Days, The Atlantic, 2012.

(18) @hamidtasnuva, Twitter, January 7, 2020.

(19) David Correia and Tyler Wall, Police: A Field Guide, Verso, 2018. 

(20) Ben Quinn, Anti-Homeless Spikes Are Part of a Wider Phenomenon of ‘Hostile Architecture’, The Guardian, 2014.

(21) Pierce Gordon, A Hundred Racist Designs, 2020.

(22) Lena V. Groeger, Discrimination by Design: The Many Ways Design Decisions Treat People Unequally, ProPublica, 2016.

(23) Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code Book, Polity, 2019.

(24) “Disposability is a disability justice term” that describes how social isolation, achieved through punitive and other cultural responses, subject marginalized populations to greater risk of criminalization because they lack social safety nets. See this Twitter thread for more information: @AbolitionF_ists, Twitter, December 16, 2020.

(25) Mark Neocleous, A Critical Theory of Police Power, Verso, 2021.

(26) David Correia and Tyler Wall, Police: A Field Guide, Verso, 2018.

(27) Sasha Costanza-Chock, Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need, MIT Press, 2020.

(28) Sue Rahr, From Warriors to Guardians — Returning American Police Culture to Democratic Ideals, The Seattle Times, 2014. 

(29) United States Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, Overview of Police Use of Force, 2020; United States Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice, The Use-of-Force Continuum, 2009. 

(30) Chicago Beyond, Why Am I Always Being Researched?, 2019.

(31) Lucy Kimbell, Rethinking Design Thinking: Part II, Design and Culture, 2021.

(32) NPR, What Police Are For: A Look Into Role Of The Police In Modern Society, 2020. 

(33) Brady Dennis, Mark Berman & Elahe Izadi, Dallas Police Chief Says ‘We’re Asking Cops to Do Too Much in This Country’, Washington Post, 2016.

(34) Chicago Police Department, Ride-along Program, n.d. 

Cynthia L. Bennett and Daniela K. Rosner, The Promise of Empathy: Design, Disability, and Knowing the “Other”, Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2019.

(35) Ovetta Sampson, Stop Bastardizing Design with False Empathy, 2020.

(36) David Correia & Tyler Wall, Police: A Field Guide, Verso, 2018. 

(37) Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, Duke University Press, 2018.

(38) Dean Spade, Normal Life: Administrative Violence, Critical Trans Politics, and the Limits of Law, Duke University Press, 2015.

(39) Brooke Staton, Julia Kramer, Pierce Gordon and Lauren Valdez, From The Technical To The Political: Democratizing Design Thinking, From Contested_Cities to Global Urban Justice, 2016.

(40) Joanna Boehnert and Dimeji Onafuwa, Design as Symbolic Violence: Reproducing the ‘isms’ + A Framework for Allies, Intersectional Perspectives on Design, Politics and Power, 2016.

(41) CST Editorial Board, Garry McCarthy, Candidate for Mayor, Chicago Sun-Times, 2019. 

(42) Ruben Pater, The Politics of Design: A (Not So) Global Design Manual for Visual Communication, BIS Publishers, 2016.

(43) USA Patriot Act of 2001, 8 U.S. Code § 1723.

(44) Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture, 2005.

(45) Sarah T. Hamid, Community Defense: Sarah T. Hamid on Abolishing Carceral Technologies, Logic Magazine, 2020.

(46) Sandra Feder, Mass Criminalization is a Root Cause of Racial Inequality Within the U.S., Stanford News, 2020. 

(47) Monica C. Bell, Police Reform and the Dismantling of Legal Estrangement, 126 Yale L. J. 2054 (2018).

(48) Michael German, Hidden in Plain Sight: Racism, White Supremacy, and Far-Right Militancy in Law Enforcement, Brennan Center, 2020.

(49) Creative Reaction Lab, How Traditional Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy, Redesigners in Action webinar series, 2020.

(50) Tema Okun, White Supremacy Culture, Dismantling Racism, n.d.

(51) Darin Buzon, Design Thinking is a Rebrand for White Supremacy: How the Current State of Design is Simply a Digitally Updated Status Quo, 2020. 

(52) Mariame Kaba, Yes, We Literally Mean Abolish the Police, New York Times, 2020.

(53) Beth Potier, Abolish Prisons, Says Angela Davis, The Harvard Gazette, 2003. 

(54) Morgan Bassichis, Alexander Lee, and Dean Spade, Building an Abolitionist Trans & Queer Movement with Everything We’ve Got, in Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex edited by Eric A. Stanley and Nat Smith, 2011. 

(55) Mark Anthony Neal, Pop Culture Helped Turn Police Officers Into Rock Stars—And Black Folks Into Criminals Exploring, Abolition for The People, 2020.

(56) Arturo Escobar, Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds, Duke University Press, 2018.

(57) The Abolition and Disability Justice Collective, Guiding Principles Based in Disability Justice, 2020.

(58) Design As Protest, Anti-Racist Design Justice Index, n.d.

(59) Ahmed Ansari, Modernity + Coloniality, n.d.; Leslie Allison Brown and Susan Strega, Research as Resistance: Critical, Indigenous and Anti-Oppressive Approaches, (60) Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2005; Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, Zed Books, 2013. 

(61) Sarah Fathallah, Why Design Researchers Should Compensate Participants, 2020.

(62) Pascal Emmer, Caroline Rivas, Brenda Salas Neves, Chris Schweidler, Technologies for Liberation: Toward Abolitionist Futures, Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice and Research Action Design, 2020.

(63) Carceral Tech Resistance Network, Homepage, n.d. https://www.carceral.tech/ 

(64) Color Coded, Homepage, n.d., https://colorcoded.la/ 

(65) May First Movement Technology, Homepage, n.d., https://mayfirst.coop/en/ 

(66) Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, Homepage, n.d., https://stoplapdspying.org/ 

(67) Dean Spade, Solidarity Not Charity: Mutual Aid for Mobilization and Survival, Social Text, 2020.

(68) Rachel Herzing, “Big Dreams and Bold Steps Towards a Police-Free Future,” Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? Police Violence and Resistance in the United States, edited by Maya Schenwar, Joe Macaré, and Alana Yu-Lan Price, Haymarket Books, 2016. 

Designed for Harm

How Products of Policing Enforce Extra-judicial Practices of Control and Submission

The conversation about policing is a Molotov cocktail of trauma, bias, propaganda, and cognitive dissonance. Many Americans are raised to think of the police, and by extension policing, as a mechanism to protect and serve. Yet, this stands in stark contrast to the experiences of those who interact with one of the nation’s largest and most dominant civil services as a purveyor of fear and dominance.

Illustration by Sophia Richardson

By Timothy Bardlavens and Jennifer Rittner

While the binary of “good cop vs. bad cop” lays blame at the feet of the individual, that framing is ultimately inadequate to interrogate the fundamental challenges of policing practices, in particular the physical and psychological damage wrought by products of policing.

Safety & Mediation or Control & Submission?

If we remove the rose-colored definitions and media-fueled propaganda around policing, ultimately there are only two definitions that matter: control and submission. Policing is, at its core, control; and that control is often applied through acts of forced submission. The brand language of policing—protect, serve, safety— justifies all manner of abuses under the guise of law and order, which viewed historically, reveals a system built by people in power to control a broader group, with the explicit goal of having them operate in ways that they—the powerful—deem acceptable and moral. We certainly agree that the prevention of loss, death, and destruction is paramount to a healthy, thriving society. In this instance control = good. But control is not evenly distributed. In fact, it is disproportionately levied against historically underrepresented communities, among them Black, immigrant, poor, neurodivergent, disabled, gender non-conforming, sexual minorities, and religious minorities.

The uneven application of law and order never rang more true than on January 6, 2021 when insurrectionists stormed our nation’s Capitol, an event that was planned on social media under the watchful eye of law enforcement, who responded with what can best be described as an inept show of force that ultimately led to death and destruction of individuals, physical property, and the national psyche. The discreet absence of law enforcement on that day stands in stark contrast to the Black Lives Matter protests on June 2, 2020. Protest participants reported what was captured in photos from that day: a dramatic show of force from the National Guard who lined the stairs of the Capitol building in pristine formation, armored and ready for war. If policing is control and submission, these events are their products.

Products of policing reflect the history of torture that backed the currency of our nation’s founding, hailing back to 400 years of con-trolling Black bodies. This unholy history forms a thick layer of socio-psychological dust covering every surface of that one room in a home that no one wants to enter, for fear of having to identify, mourn, and accept the past that is so deeply connected to and influential in our lives. 

This is the level of control the mere presence of a patrol car has on Black bodies, this visceral feeling of fear.

An Unholy History: Patrolling as Situational Profiling

Some of the first policing systems in the American South began as a means for controlling its Black population in the form of slave patrols. Created in 1704 within the Carolina colony, slave patrols’ sole duty, unlike constables and sheriffs, was to enforce colonial and state law. White citizens took an oath to “faithfully discharge the trust reposed in them as the law directs,” and traveled from farm to farm in order to observe slave activity, provide security, and punish slaves who violated plantation rules.
Slave patrols weren’t merely reactive, activating only when an enslaved captive ran away. They were a proactive means of control. Their mere presence, in uniform, with badges prominently placed, was meant to be a deterrent—a warning to the captives not to even fathom claiming the right to bodily autonomy or justice. This consistent patrolling of plantations and the Black bodies that resided on them, or stopping and questioning Black people who seemed “out of place,” was a system of mass control that mirrors the over-policing of poor, majority-Black communities, and serves as the inception of predictive policing in America.

In fact, majority Black communities experience this practice of patrolling every day, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. High-touch police presence in marginalized communities contributes to the feeling of being criminalized and ensures that minor crimes, crimes of poverty, and pre-crimes (See: broken windows policing) are caught and over-punished, validating higher police presence, which ensures a greater amount of arrests, thus driving up the crime rate, justifying a heavier police presence. Of course, the practice isn’t special to com-munities with heavy Black populations. The surveillance of Black bodies, under the sup-position of illicit activity, extends to any space where the individual is “out of place”— whether jogging in a middle-class neighbor-hood, driving a luxury car, napping in a college lounge, walking home from the store with chips and soda, or simply existing with the condition of having black and brown skin. Police call this situational profiling, or the act of assessing perceived illicit activity based on context surrounding a potential suspect. Meaning, police are able to more effectively impose control over an area, feeling justified in randomly stopping individuals for ambiguous laws or simply because they “look suspicious.”

Scenario A: Driving While Black
Two residents are driving through a middle-class neighborhood, one a white woman, the other a Black woman. Both are driving the exact same car, going the exact same speed. They pass a police officer stopped at a stop sign, the officer turns onto the street behind each individual. What is each person doing? 

• White driver: Hasn’t noticed the officer, continues, largely unbothered, OR, Notices the officer, checks speed, continues, largely unbothered.

• Black driver: Notices the officer, checks her speed multiple times, slows down, touches her seat belt, thinks back to ensure she didn’t run a sign or light, repetitively checks her rearview mirror. She thinks about where her driver’s license and registration card might be, and worries that her movements will be misinterpreted if she reaches for them. If she has preplanned, her documents are strategically placed in her car so that she can optimize her movements to access them without incidentally provoking the fear response of an approaching officer. She lowers the music to make sure the interior space of the car is calm and still. She neutralizes her affect, practicing her verbal response in her head. She feels both scared and angry. Her heart rate elevates and her concentration becomes hyper-focused. She enters a post-traumatic state that continues whether or not she has been stopped. 

This is the level of control the mere presence of a patrol car has on Black bodies, this visceral feeling of fear, of hoping the officer will turn on the next street, or that their lights never flash on. Not because of any guilt of illicit activity, but because the history of control and submission has been ingrained.

Scenario B: Drugging While White
Two college students are walking in their college town with a small bag of weed in their pockets. Both young men are dressed casually, carrying a backpack, and texting as they walk. They see a stop-and-frisk station up ahead. What does each one do? We offer this exercise for your consideration. How do you imagine a Black student and a white student responding in this scenario? In our own personal experiences, we have witnessed Black friends, neighbors, and even family face arrest for low-level drug possession, while white friends, colleagues, and classmates routinely purchased, sold, and used drugs with impunity. That reality was starker prior to the legalization of marijuana in parts of the country, but it continues to inform the difference between how Black and white youth interact with police around assumptions of criminality.

The patrolling, surveillance, and situational profiling of Black bodies was the job of slave patrols and is ingrained into the role of police. Their presence, the markings on their cars, and flash of their badges are all meant to be symbols of authority, not safety. By definition, authority assumes the right to enforce obedience.

Products of Control

An audit of the products of control includes both objects and actions:

Patrolling
The act of claiming ownership over the movements of others alongside the threat of punishment for those who are deemed out of place or out of line. Patrolling establishes a hierarchy around who has access to free movement and who is subjected to constraints. (See: Slave patrols)

Surveillance
The surreptitious tracking of individuals with-out their knowledge or consent, which is often based on preconceived notions of where criminality happens, what it looks like, and who the perpetrators will be. Surveillance often catches, and therefore punishes, the surveilled, reinforcing the idea of criminality as predetermined. What it fails to capture is analogous criminality (or behaviors deemed criminal) in places and by people who are not under surveillance. (See: Predictive Policing)

Uniforms and Vehicles
Depending on one’s place in the social hierarchy, the uniform and badge are worn either by those who serve you or oppress you. The police cruiser is either an indication of safety or an impending catastrophe. Lights and sirens either mean that help is on the way or the reminder of trauma. (See: January 6, 2021)

Zoning
The state’s determination concerning what types of activities can occur in a particular place, which can be weaponized to punish those who are deemed to be acting in a manner inappropriate to the established zone. Perceptions about who belongs in spaces and how people behave or comply with the rules have been ingrained to the degree that citizens have assumed the right to police other citizens, as if re-enacting the slave patrols of their ancestors. (See: Barbecue Becky)

Weapons
Symbols of strength and dominance, guns, tasers, tear gas, and flashbangs are the tools of terror used by police to justify force. Just as the slave patrollers of the 19th century brandished weapons to exert their will over Black bodies, police today draw their weapons as a matter of routine. We’ve seen guns drawn as an immediate reaction and a mechanism to circumvent civil conversation and de-escalation, moving directly to extra-judicial compliance. One of many examples is representative in the video of Sandra Bland being arrested on July 10, 2015, where she exerted her right to smoke a cigarette inside of her car during a police stop along the highway. Her act of personal agency triggered the officer’s assumption as sole authority, and as she failed to acquiesce, his response was to draw his gun and force Ms. Bland out of her car. The message is simple, “Submit or suffer the consequences.” The inclination to reach directly for a gun, especially with Black bodies, is inherently founded in the toxic stew of fear, supremacy, and dominance. (See: Sandra Bland)

Products of Submission
A similar audit of the products of submission reveals the psychological domination inherent to the practices of policing.

Intimidation
The act of using physical and psychological force to impose dominance over others. Intimidation is a key tactic in maintaining unquestionable authority and is a commonly accepted practice in maintaining control. From the show of force against Black Lives Matter protesters, to the language of brutality used against suspects at the site of an incident or in interrogation rooms, to the wielding of weapons against unarmed citizens, intimidation has become equated with power and authority. In fact, they are weapons of fear of impotence. Just as riots are the “voice of the unheard,” intimidation tactics are the tools of the weak-spirited who assume unearned authority over those who are in no position to fight back. (See: Weapons of policing)

Non-Autonomy
Forcing the accused to submit their own body to self-incrimination, the police line-up predicates purported success on the notion that a traumatized victim could adequately distinguish from among a handful of individuals who are, by virtue of their presence in the line-up, probable criminals. The line-up is designed and intended to make each individual body seem guilty. Vulnerable in their appearance of guilt, subjected to the vagaries of perception, this product of policing serves to dehumanize subjects as essentially unindividuated. False-positive identifications con-firm the ineffectiveness of the line-up, and historically, the form references the slave auction, in which bodies were lined up by slavers to be observed and judged by those who had the privilege of standing on the other side of the color line. (See: Shaka King)

Restraint
No encounter with the police would be complete without the threat of being physically restrained with handcuffs. The threat alone is an act of terror that often causes suspects to react in trauma as they hope and try to avoid being forced into physical submission. Anyone who has not experienced forced restraints should interrogate what it feels like to be stripped of one’s bodily autonomy, extra-judicially, because a person with a badge has the authority to do so. Now imagine your body lying prone on the ground—on a public sidewalk—completely vulnerable, while a full-sized human kneels on you and demands that you offer your body up to those restraints. The handcuff is more than an object, it is an action that dehumanizes the individual who the police officer deems a threat, but who has, more often than not, not been convicted of a crime. Handcuffs say, “You are no longer a free person. Your body is not your own.” (See: Honestie Hodges)

Humiliation
Forcing accused suspects to endure a performance of guilt, police departments coordinate with local news reporters to publicly humiliate suspects as they make the walk to or from police stations or courthouses, effectively adding to the trauma of having been accused of a crime. It’s important to note the historic, racialized pattern of news coverage. (See: The Central Park Five)

Torture 2.0
On February 1, 2021 a 9-year-old Black girl in Rochester, NY ran out of her home during a family argument and, eager to get her back safely, her mother called the local police for help. Cop-cam video shows the child being sur-rounded by a group of men—strangers to her—forcibly grabbed and dragged by at least one, and at one point wrestled onto the ground—in the snow—by two of these men who tower over and yell at her. Her voice shrieks in fear as she begs for her father, trying to release herself from their grip, as they handcuff and force her into the back of a squad car. As she continues to react out of fear and confusion, they perceive her reaction as an unwillingness to submit, and pepper sprayed this 9-year-old child. Out of perhaps an ironic twist of self-awareness, one officer reproaches the young girl for, “acting like a child.”

Submitting to the police is an unevenly spread expectation across the faces of the American people. Many of the same individuals who believe the police exist to protect and serve, also believe they have the right to push back and challenge the police with righteous indignation. Contrarily, those who see the police as agitators and fearmongers are expected to capitulate
to the police’s every whim, to prostrate themselves to authority.

This culture of submission insidiously manifests in our cultural norms, which attach inherent meanings to a person’s public guilt. Intimidating, restraining, and humiliating bodies are the products of submission so deeply embedded in policing.

The practice of public humiliation, while being restrained, by authorities can be traced to the use of mechanisms like the pillory, a wooden device used in the 17th century that forced a person to bend over, stick their head and hands into holes and then be locked in place. These people would be put on display in public, to be ridiculed, condemned, and even abused by the citizenry. That said, the practice of dehumanization and humiliation lands more squarely on the doorsteps of the U.S. with the introduction of “buck breaking.” The act of restraining male slaves to posts or with horse hobbles, then raping them in front of their families and other slaves or forcing two slave men to have sex with one another.

While this obviously isn’t a common practice today, the tendrils still exist through the co-dependent relationship between the police and the media. Perp walks are a product of this relationship, which results in the putting of bodies on display to warn communities of their place, the swaying of public opinion of an individual’s guilt or lack of humanity, the hero worshiping of police who “got their man,” and the demasculinization of Black men through threats of rape and sexual violence while in the hands of government-run systems of incarcerative oppression.

Designing Against Harm

Policing was uniquely designed for the psychological and physical control and submission of a populace. Over the past several centuries products have been refined and redesigned for efficiency and effectiveness, but the system and its goal have remained the same—protect property and power. So when do we begin addressing the system AND products?

In product design, one of the most com-mon whiteboarding exercises is a prompt to reinvent the ATM. Generally, whiteboard exercises are meant to gauge an individual’s product thinking, to see how they think about the needs of people, and how they vocalize their process. This prompt in particular is unique because the best response is always, “Why do we need ATMs?” As designers, we often iterate on preexisting products, instead of deeply assessing and questioning why they exist. This is the fallacy of policing, and by extension, its products. Policing products have been designed and redesigned for centuries, resulting in “innovations” like tasers, flex-cuffs, flash-bangs, predictive algorithms, and increasingly opaque surveillance mechanisms.

These innovations fail because they focus on the product at the expense of meaningful systemic change.

• Innovation Failure Horse hobbles redesigned as shackles, redesigned as handcuffs, redesigned as zip tie cuffs.
• System Interrogation What is the purpose of restraining people? How can we keep an individual from hurting themselves or others while in police custody? Would handcuffs or other restraints still be the answer, or is that the easiest option because it exists?

Dismantling the police isn’t a call to destroy the police, but to abolish the system, practices, and products born out of the torture, dehumanization, and destruction of human bodies for the explicit and implicit goal of preserving economic and state regimes. Reimagining, and by extension redesigning, policing and its products is the process by which we create new means of equitably protecting the citizenry, ensuring every per-son is treated with dignity, while prioritizing the preservation of human life above all else.

Systems, practices, and products are designed, and can be redesigned—IF we can acknowledge and accept the foundation was never broken, but has always worked by design.

Futures of Policing

By Default or By Design

In the future, police could use remote technology to peacefully disarm suspects without ever firing a shot. Or perhaps police will use lasers to slice off the legs of even nonviolent offenders. In the future, police forces may expand, but their demographics could reflect the multiculturality of a minority-white America. Or maybe drones will replace police altogether. If they don’t, community gardens potentially will.

Illustration by Ariel Sinha

By Jamie McGhee

There are as many ways to imagine the future of American policing as there are people living in the country. Some see the United States hurtling toward an unavoidable dystopian crimescape, while others see police systems ripe for abolition. The 2020 protests sparked by George Floyd’s death have proven the criticality of this discussion, as organizers all over the country demand a nationwide interrogation of the police system. Clearly, policing needs to be redesigned. But what will that look like?

To find out, I sat down with organizer DeRay Mckesson of Campaign Zero and storyteller- poet Niki Franco of the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy. I also analyzed the ideas of novelist Sophia Stewart, law professor Bennett Capers, and cartoonist Ezra Clayton Daniels.

Will police exist in the future?

DeRay Mckesson, Organizer

DeRay Mckesson is a co-founder of the police reform movement Campaign Zero, whose 2020 #8CantWait campaign called for policy reforms and drew vocal support from celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Lupita Nyong’o.

DeRay cut right to the heart of the matter with the practiced precision that comes from years as an organizer. In the future, will there even be police at all? Or will abolition succeed? According to him, that is the wrong question to ask.

“The question is really not police or no police,” he said. “That is a losing frame. There will always be conflict. The presence of conflict between people is exacerbated by inequity, but it is not always a result of inequity. We can have all the resources we need, and there will still be conflict. So the question becomes, who intervenes in the worst of the conflict? Who intervenes in the worst of the harm? The police are the easiest, simplest, and laziest answer to those questions—not the best.”
While some organizers believe that the police force as we know it needs to be entirely abolished, others suggest that it can be reformed in the short-term. These beliefs are often viewed as mutually exclusive.

“I think it’s actually one of the tricks of white supremacy to make it this battle between reform and abolition,” he said. “One approach says to take it [the police system] down in pieces, and one says to take it down all at one time. I don’t think that’s actually a battle.”
DeRay emphasized that short-term change does not preclude long-term abolition. “As somebody for whom this is not theoretical, I know that there are people who are harmed today, and if I have the power for them to be less harmed, I should use that power,” he said.

Similarly, DeRay noted that the end of solitary confinement is not the end of incarceration, but with the end of solitary confinement, inmates would be moved to another, potentially better part of the jail. “There’s a frame-work that says that’s not abolition, that’s not the end of prisons and jails,” he continued. “Well, it’s like do we end solitary confinement or not? We absolutely do. This is a no-brainer.”

DeRay explained the importance of being deeply engaged in harm reduction, to make sure that all of our strategies are heading in one direction. “People talk about it as if we are walking in two different directions.” DeRay shook his head. “In fighting for the imprisoned to have three solid meals that are nutritious, is that the end of incarceration? It’s not. Is having free phone calls the end of incarceration? It’s not. But is it the right thing to do? Absolutely. And does it get us on the path of undoing the carceral state? It does.”

When it comes to policing, it’s more com-mon to find analyses and criticisms than concrete steps forward. DeRay pointed out that in the social justice space in general, there is infinitely more work around the problem than the solution. DeRay’s own entrance into this particular organizing space informed his adamance about pushing for-ward actionable policies through Campaign Zero. “I didn’t grow up in policing,” he said. “Education was where I started. So I too… [realized], ‘This is bad, let me go see what people are going to do about it.’”

That’s where Campaign Zero organizes from. “We make solutions public. We try to help people understand what you can do. You don’t need to be in some 300-person organizer collective to get access to the information. We’ll never win that way,” he said.

For DeRay, the future hinges on one thing: “The future of policing is a question of, could we organize?”

Will technology make policing more or less violent?

Sophia Stewart, Novelist of Matrix IV (published in 1981 as All Eyes On Me Incorporated)

That “we” DeRay references is a critical facet of change. Who does it include? We non-law enforcement civilians? We designers, educators, and writers? We, a nation of people who believe in the fair exercise of justice?

What is the future, however, if “we” can’t organize, while the American police force is allowed to grow unchecked in power, and technology advances exponentially right alongside it? For science fiction novelist Sophia Stewart, that would be calamitous. Over the past four decades, she has witnessed the police force increasingly evolve to resemble the hyperpoliced dystopias in her fiction.
In her novel Matrix IV, she speculates that advances in technology will soon build devices of surveillance, policing, and penal jus-tice directly into the human body itself. In this future, the prevalence of surveillance technology means that every felony is recorded and punished as soon as it happens. And what is that punishment? In Stewart’s future, prisons have no walls. Instead, they
have rings. Anyone convicted of a crime is microchipped and fitted with rings that intake a steady stream of biometric data while floating around the user’s body. Rigorously tracked, the convicted per-son is allowed back into society to resume their nor-mal lives. The rings serve as an omnipresent police force that metes out violent punishments for perceived re-offenses. If someone is thought to be fleeing the scene of a crime, the rings activate lasers to slice off one or both feet. The crime of murder results in instant decapitation. In a 2017 interview with BMEntertainment, Stewart acknowledged that this technobrutal police state is a dark one, but it is not without precedent. Contemporary stop-and-frisk policies, the use of tasers to subdue suspects, and the rampant tear-gassing of protesters demonstrate the degree to which the state is comfortable giving law enforcement officers the means and mandate to punish civilians extrajudicially and at their own discretion. In Stewart’s speculative narrative, the rings are designed to be race blind—a clear critique of real-life policing—but in her dystopian future, racism continues to inform definitions of criminality. And designers remain complicit with the worst offenders of state-sponsored violence, as they employ the tools of innovation to build newer, better technologies that serve as extensions of state power. None of this happens without design, either in fiction or in real life.

On the other hand, when the demographics of the state change, then the intentions and philosophies guiding policing technology could change too. In sharp contrast to Stewart, one lawyer believes that America’s changing demographics will soon lead to a future scrubbed clean of police violence.

Does policing play a role in Afrofuturism?

Bennett Capers, Law Professor

Fordham Criminal Law Professor Bennett Capers believes that the days of white majority rule are numbered. In 2044, the year when the Census Bureau projects that the white population will become the minority in the U.S., law enforcement technologies created by people of color and funded by a
majority-POC government will bring a decisive end to police brutality. In “Afrofuturism, Critical Race Theory, and Policing in the Year 2044,” published in the April 2019 issue of the NYU Law Review, Capers meditates on possible police futures through the lens of Afrofuturism, a philosophy of liberation whose aesthetics are rooted in the African continent. “A core tenet of Afrofuturism,” Capers says, “is that we embrace technology, especially technology that can disrupt hierarchies and contribute a public good.”

Power.

For Capers, Afrofuturism demands the dissolution of hierarchies and the establishment of systems of equity and economic parity. Wealth redistribution is key, as frustration over economic inequality often fuels violent crime. In this future, redistribution accompanies a nationwide effort to de-fetishize capitalism. People begin to view overt wealth as déclassé as social programs make certain markers of luxury redundant—in a world with universal childcare, there is no need for private nannies.

Increasingly diverse courtrooms overturn centuries of American law rooted in white male patriarchal ideals. Virtual reality plays a crucial role in building empathy, allowing everyone from judge to jury to digitally step into the lives of people from all backgrounds.

Narratives.

With a shift in political and judicial power comes a shift in what is criminalized and how crime is punished. Sex work is legalized, meaning that sex workers are no longer forced into dangerous underground situations in order to avoid arrest. The avail-ability of social programs means citizens must no longer make ends meet with malum prohibitum crimes, or actions that are illegal despite lacking intrinsic amorality, such as selling loose cigarettes; furthermore, such actions become legal as well. The War on Drugs meets a swift end. What becomes illegal? Explicit discrimination. Removing a passenger from a plane because of their nationality or even tailing someone through a store because of their race is made actionable on a civil level.

Outcomes.
“Afrofuturists, as utilitarians, will ensure that the punishment, when imposed, serves a public good that exceeds its cost,” Capers says. For example, anyone who commits a violent crime receives psychological treatment and ther-apy, and restorative justice allows the perpe-trator and the survivors of the victim to work together toward resolution.

How does policing look in such a society? Like Stewart, Capers sees hyper-surveil-lance as inevitable, but for him, it’s a benefit. Speaking of the contemporary role of cam-eras in countering police brutality, he says, “Surveillance cameras have functioned as a tool of survival, as a way of making racism and inequality real, as a godsend, and as proof.” He longs therefore for widespread surveillance technology—including not only facial recognition, but also gait and voice recognition—in addition to the collection of DNA from newborns. The constant but equal surveillance of every citizen eliminates the racial disparities inherent to contemporary American policing.

In this world, highly sensitive surveillance equipment can also remotely deactivate suspects’ weapons, thereby eliminating police shootings in “self-defense.” According to Capers, this will result in the elimination of police brutality and racial profiling. This contrasts sharply with the technological land-scape that Stewart lays out, where even non-violent crimes are met with brutal violence. What separates these visions of the future is design: Capers’ technology is optimized to pacify and disarm, while Stewart’s is intended to punish and incapacitate. It is clear that one of the capacities of designers is to consider how to mitigate harm through innovation.

Working within the context of legal reform, Capers offers a window into a near future that asks all of us to do the hard work of changing not just policing, but the social systems and narratives that activate the system. Abolitionists, however, believe that Capers’ ideas for reform do not go far enough and that policing needs to be dismantled entirely.

What will police abolition look like on the ground?

Niki Franco, Poet-Storyteller

Niki Franco is a storyteller, abolitionist, and poet whose work focuses on decolonization, reproductive justice, and systems of power. As an Artist in Residence at the UCLA Luskin Institute on Inequality and Democracy, she believes that storytelling is key to envisioning a world without policing.
“Black folks, oppressed people, and pre-colonial societies are societies of storytellers,” Niki said. “Through apocalyptic, horrific moments, we’ve constantly had to practice interrogation, asking ourselves, ‘Okay, hold up. Where do we come from? What are the legacies of care and community support that we come from, and what is not normal?’ Our stories are really good at lifting the veil on things that actually don’t support us, on things that are actually harmful and abusive, and are actually not indigenous to us.”

Storytelling encourages people of color to visualize the future by looking backward and drawing from centuries-old traditions indigenous to West Africa. “We’re in a moment where restorative justice is popping up. These are practices that come from indigenous tribes out of West Africa. We’ve been practicing mediation with our people for a very long time, because it’s nowhere in our historic legacy to have a default mode of disposing of our people, right? We’ve always had a strong value of human life and of community,” she said.

Niki acknowledges that indigenous ideas of restorative justice clash with how popular American media portrays justice. Television shows, movies, and music push revenge fantasies that subconsciously justify a carceral state and a police state.

What is the role of artists in pushing against these narratives? “Storytellers are tasked with not just challenging and cutting through the hegemony of thought, but also offering alternatives,” Niki said. “What we’re dealing with right now is a crisis of imagination. Right now, and not just right now, but at any revolutionary moment in history, cultural workers—be it by way of pamphlets, stories, oral histories, songs, chants, and illustrations—have always had a role in advancing the new ideology.”

“Abolition” and “defunding” may sound like distant goals, but Niki doesn’t agree. “Oh, sometimes we think it’s this big lofty thing. But the core values of abolition are care, are solidarity, are valuing relationships, are relating to the lands in a non-extractive way. And all of us were tasked with negotiating what that meant in our communities this year. Many young, Black, brown, and indigenous folks were just like, ‘Okay, how do we create sup-port systems? How do we create networks of care for one another?’ Sometimes we think it has to be a full revolution. But that won’t hap-pen overnight,” she said.

The reality is that abolition is grounded in the immediate and the attainable—human relationships. “If we want to reorganize our society outside of the punitive state,” Niki said, “then we must develop capacities to actually be in right relationship with each other, even when bad things happen.” Like DeRay, Niki believes that praxis needs to accompany theory, that uniting people and making change in the field is key. “If we are honest about the origins and functionality of policing, life-affirming institutions and policing cannot co-exist in my opinion. Abolition is very clearly demanding almost an entire overhaul of our society as we under-stand it. Workers should absolutely be centered in this transformation. There are really imaginative and creative, beautiful ways in which we want to rebuild. And there are also fundamental structural things that we need to address: Black labor, immigrant labor, and what’s considered unskilled wage labor are the anchors of our economy, which have contributed to the wealthiest nation of human history,” Niki noted.

Television shows, movies and music push revenge fantasies that subconsciously justify a carceral state and a police state.

Despite the U.S.’ wealth, Niki has encountered critics of abolition who believe it isn’t economically attainable. “The constant push-back so many of us receive is, ‘Well, who’s going to pay for that?’ But there’s no historical reason why we should cut ourselves short. Abundance exists but is coalesced for a small percentage, for the elite,” she remarked.

An abolitionist society would provide abundantly for all its people. “We all deserve access to our basic needs,” she said, “and not just shelter, water, food, but as spiritual beings on this earth. We should have access to care, mental health support, the great out-doors. We deserve to exist in the interconnectedness and the expansiveness of the natural world. And we deserve leisure. We deserve rest.”
Everyone does deserve rest. But for organizers like Niki that can be in short supply. “I get really excited and then sometimes I get really overwhelmed,” she said. “Because when I think of this abolitionist future, it’s not just about the cages, the prisons or jails, it’s also about, ‘What does a just economy look like? How do we stop extracting from the earth? How do we stop policing each other?’” One cartoonist in Los Angeles has a few ideas.

How will cities institute abolition?

Ezra Clayton Daniels, Cartoonist

In the June 9, 2020 edition of the online journal The Nib, science fiction cartoonist Ezra Clayton Daniels sketched out the speculative realities that can replace the Los Angeles Police Department by 2023.
The starting point for Daniels is housing every homeless Los Angeles resident. What follows are four proposed agencies that pro-vide essential support services:

• LA Department of Food Security ensures that all residents have free, vitamin-rich food, courtesy of a 100-acre farm that offers volunteers agricultural training in exchange for labor.
• Climate Mitigation Department regulates individual, industrial, and commercial pollution and resource use. In the case of climate catastrophes, such as wildfires, they are the first responders. Jobs created by this department boost the local economy.
• Mental Health Department handles all incidents involving people who require psychiatric specialists. Police precincts are repurposed into short- and long-term mental healthcare facilities.
• Department of Crime Deduction hires detectives of all ages from a variety of backgrounds, selecting people based on creative problem-solving abilities, not seniority within a police force. The increase in diverse perspectives corresponds directly to an uptick in the speed with which cases are solved.

The result? A community that is fed, cared for, and protected. That is the abolitionist dream that organizers like Niki and DeRay advocate for, one in which adequate social and human services mitigate the need for punitive action by the state.

What is the global importance of the American police system?

The future of policing could be a grim one that feeds on violence, or a constructive one that leverages abolition to support local communities. What is clear about American policing is that it’s not just about America.

Niki gravely outlines this at the end of her interview—how the United States chooses to proceed will have global ramifications.

“This is not just an American site. This is not just about dealing with the white supremacist nation space that is the United States,” she said. “It’s actually recognizing that the United States has a very particular positionality in maintaining its military, financial, cultural, and economic influence over the rest of the globe.”

According to Niki, there is hope. “If we’re able to slowly chip away at the beast of these policing mechanisms, we can actually hope-fully see a more peaceful global community over time, a community that doesn’t have the boot of the U.S. on its neck. This isn’t just about Americans and what Black Americans are going through. This is a global struggle. And it’s up to us in the empire to take responsibility,” she said.

As the protests that began in June 2020 continue into the new year, every American—the organizers and the artists, the lawyers, and the novelists—stands at a precipitous moment in history. Designers have many opportunities in this moment to leverage their own skills and the power of a vast community to inform what comes next. The design of narratives that build conversations about what can be. The design of tools that mitigate harm. The defetishization of luxury and a deep commitment to the social sector. And the support of activists on the ground by hearing their calls for change. The future of policing will either happen by default or by design. Which way will the design community choose to go? Which way will the country choose to go?