Abolitionist infrastructures: Coalition Against Police Abuse, state violence, and the horizon of struggle

In this paper, I analyze how an organization, Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA), was formed to challenge the increasingly militarized racialized police force in Los Angeles during neoliberal industrial reorganization, regional abandonment, and massive prison boom in the 1970s and 1980s. Studying CAPA allows for an analysis of the radical ideas and actions that came out of on-the-ground mobilization by the very communities being criminalized and policed. By applying a framework combining social reproduction, racial capitalism, and police geographies, I argue that analyzing CAPA provides critical insight into how the police and police violence are integral to reproducing and securing racialized spaces, capitalist power relations, and expanded accumulation. Through CAPA, I demonstrate how a grassroots formation developed an analysis around policing and capitalism. This analysis informed their antipolicing infrastructure centered around social reproduction to raise counterhegemony and advance a broader challenge against ongoing state violence and the social relations of production, which they saw as upholding race-classed oppression. Doing so demonstrates a prefigurative politics which can inform the current moment of challenging policing, whereby struggles around social reproduction challenge the everyday conditions of existence and provide leverage for building consciousness around and contesting sociospatial relations to transform society.