By Maya Dukmasova, Chicago Reader
In light of relentless police violence against black people, activist Jessica Disu says it’s clear that “our police is not working—we need to replace it with something new,” she says. “It’s more than a repair. We need something new.”
Disu isn’t alone in her embrace of the idea. Though Black Lives Matter and other groups have been vocally campaigning for police reform since 2014, the tone (and the banners) of demonstrations in Chicago this summer have become explicitly abolitionist.
It seems the city finds itself at the epicenter of a growing movement imagining and building a world without cops. And some grassroots groups, tired of waiting for top-down change from the very agencies they protest, have taken it upon themselves to start building the abolitionist society they want to live in.
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