You're listening to Comedy Central. Dereka, Welcome to the show. Hi, thank you so much for having me. You have written a book that is sure to get you a ton of praise and then I mean death threats and criticisms from the high heavens, because I mean, like I've learned this personally. If you even suggest a criticism of the police, especially in America, you're seen as somebody who hates old police. You're seen as somebody who loves crime. You're seen as
somebody who just doesn't believe in the functioning society. But when you go abolish the police, I mean, how let's start with that. How do you even begin a conversation around like abolishing the police without having people believe that then we're gonna be living like in like a mad
Max dystopian future. Oh well, it depends on who I'm talking to, right, So there are people who I organize with or communities where I live, and when I talk about police abolition, the first question is, you know, what about the murderers? What about the rapists? Will I be saying? And I'm usually in conversation with people who are most vulnerable to violence from their lovers, their neighbors, strangers, cops, And so then I asked them, with a million cops
right now, do you feel safe? And usually their answer is no. And what abolition feels like to them is nothing. Right, it feels like absolutely not. And when you have nothing, no investment in your education and your health care, you know, and any of the things that would make you live a life where you can thrive, police feel like something,
and something can feel like everything is nothing. And so I try to articulate is that police abolition or prison abolition is not merely the absence of police, right, it's eliminating the root causes of harm, and it's eliminated the kind of society that could rely on police to solve that harm because we know police can't solve it. So that's sort of where I start. I ask people if
they feel safe, what makes them feel safe? And how can we start building that world together instead of just relying on police to do that work because it's ineffective. I asked this question, I go, why can we not as society not just eliminate the need for police in those certain areas? So we go, I agree with you,
police shouldn't be helping people unlock their cause. Police shouldn't be helping a homeless person who's on the street, Police shouldn't be interacting with somebody who has a mental illness. Police shouldn't be coming to you because you played your music so loud, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And police, I
think would say the same thing. So if we eliminate the need for police to do those things, and then they can focus on subduing criminals, you know, like, as you said, the murderers, the killers, the kidnappers, or whatever it would be, would that not solve the problem. Why do you still argue for abolition as a whole? Oh yeah, of course. Well one reason it's because we should ask questions like why do people kill people? Oh, why do
people commit sex with a violence? Because sending police to go and arrest someone who's a murderer, it doesn't prevent the murder. Right. So I think about the neighborhood where I grew up. So many black voice I have questions on don't live to become in They just don't. They don't make it past twenty one, they don't make it past fifteen, they don't make it past thirty. It's not as if police are standing out in front of their houses every night protecting them from the bullets that enter
their windows. That's not what policing do. Police can go get the person who may have killed them, but that doesn't save lives. That's fifteen sixteen thousand people who are killed in the US. Sixteen thousand people rather who are killed in the US every single year. And what we essentially task police to do is go be body searchers when we actually know what eliminates and prevents murders, right, which is a strong economy, jobs, healthcare, education, being connected
as a part of a community where there's accountability. If you're disrupting communities by taking away jobs, by decimating education, by putting people in prison, so then when they come out they're in a much more precarious situation in the first place, you're essentially creating the conditions for more of alens, right, and that doesn't keep anybody safe. In a world where the police have been abolished. Two things. One, what is the transitionary period? You know, because that's a scary part.
It's like because when you go abolished the police, people go like, so no police tomorrow? Does that mean we get right? And then the second part of that question is, so it's like, one, what is the transitionary period? And two what then happens when somebody kills people have been killing from Bible times? You know, so what that happens? So let's starts with what is the transitionary period? Yes?
Can I actually answer the questions in rivers ahead? So, um, if we think about something like, I don't know, murder, lots of murder happened because a man wants to control the sexuality of a woman. Okay, and so that's not something that's natural to a man, it's something he is conditioned to do under patriarchy. Right, So abolitionist acts, how can we eradicate what's conditioning men to believe that they should be able to control a woman's sexual life? Right?
How do we eradicate that impulse to say, no, you can't leave this house, No you can't break up to the point where we will murder that person. The second reason why people kill each other is for control, Um, like over petty arguments something you said. And I'm using men as an example because they're overwhelmingly convicted of murdering, right, Okay, not to yeah, not to this any man. Okay, So the second reason why people kill each other, it's because
of these these petty arguments. Right, It's like you said something and so to my manhood, and now I'm angry. Now we're gonna that's exactly exactly. So people are conditioned to do that. And the good thing about well, it's not good that they're conditioned, but that conditioning can be undone. Right. We can teach people to have different kinds of relationships. We can teach men and boys and children how to interact with women differently, or people who are trance of
people are queer. I don't disagree with that. I wonder, isn't that not leading to a utopian place? Like it's it's a utopian ideal. But what happens? I still ask the only question, which is what happens if eight out of ten men are like, we've been conditioned. We we're fine with this. True out of ten men come and go, I'm taking what's yours, I'm killing your woman. I'm doing who then? Now? Yes, Which is why I try to answer the questions in reverse, because one abolition does not
happen overnight. There are a million cops, there are twenty three hundred jails in prisons, that eighteen thousand long forced me agencies. America loves cops. There's no way abolition is going to happen overnight, and there is no abolitionist who I know, who are organized with who expects it to happen. But we do expect people is to be committed to experimentations and figuring out how to get there. How do
we get to that too? Out of ten? Because right now we're in a society where it's like note out of ten, how do we how do we even get there? And so what's frustrating is that people will have to take a whole step back and say, well, you don't have an answer for every single scenario, so there do anything right? What's so sad is that cops don't have an answer for every single scenario. But who is funded police? Right, we get increased police budgets, murder jumps, Okay, we need
to increase police. Well, if they knew the answer, if more police was the answer, then why isn't murder decreasing? Why is it theft decreasing? Why isn't all these ills in society decreasing? And so we're doing the inverse right, So the one example that's usually helping for me the analogy of like a house with the with the leaky roof, right, So you have dripping and dripping and dripping, and then you put a bucket underneath it to catch this water.
The leak picks up. Next thing you know, the buckets are overflowing, and at some point someone who has sent to the house says, we need to get rid of these buckets because they're like, it's mess everywhere. It's not working on the leak, and abolitionists are trying to figure out, well, why is the house leaking in the first place. It right, and the police are kind of like the buckets. It's how buckets don't kill people. They're kind of like the buckets.
People are like, you want to take buckets out of my house. This is gonna flood, it's gonna smell like no dw it's gonna be messy, and we're like no, no, no, no no, we don't want your house to flood. We want the roof to stop leaking. And it's gonna take much more to stop that roof from leaking than it is just to keep replacing buckets. Buying buckets getting different colors of buckets. That's there's only so much we can do with that, because buckets were not intended to stop leaks, right.
That takes a different kind of skill and a different kind of imagination, a different kind of commitment. Fundamentally, what you're saying is Americans need to think about solving the cause instead of only treating the symptoms. And to that, I say good luck. Okay, Deerka, thank you so much for joining me. It's been amazing having you here, and your book is twice as amazing as the conversation because
you can have it for much longer. Wat's the Daily Show week Central on Comedy Central and stream full episodes anytime all on Paramount Plus. This has been a Comedy Central podcast