An interview with Derecka Purnell, the author of Becoming Abolitionists, about what makes communities unsafe—and how she went from calling 911 to fighting for abolition.
Booked is a series of interviews about new books. In this edition, Lyra Walsh Fuchs talks to Derecka Purnell, the author of Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom (Astra House).
In Becoming Abolitionists, Purnell charts how she went from calling 911 “for almost everything” to fighting for the end of prisons and police. Purnell is a human rights lawyer, writer, and organizer. She monitored police with the National Lawyers Guild and the Black Movement-Law Project in Baltimore during the protests after Freddie Gray’s murder in 2015 and has joined uprising crowds everywhere from Ferguson to Capetown. When we spoke, she was at Howard University to support the student sit-in against poor housing conditions. Her book—part memoir, part essay, and part argument—is an organizing tool itself, inviting in skeptics and offering a bridge to committed activists in other movements.
Lyra Walsh Fuchs: What, if anything, has surprised you about the conversations you’ve been having about the book? Is there anything you wish that you included that you didn’t?
Derecka Purnell: I have all these very specific ideas about what a transition could look like, and I went back and forth about including them, because I didn’t want the book to be read as “This is what we need to do to build an abolitionist...
Read Full Story: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/booked-why-do-we-call-the-police
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