Abolitionist Infrastructures:Coalition Against Police Abuse, planning, and the horizon of struggle

Keywords: Abolition, Carcerality, Racial Capitalism,
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Planning and constructing egalitarian worlds necessitates thinking through what it means to study and engage in liberatory praxis. My case analyzes the Coalition Against Police Abuse (CAPA) in Los Angeles as I situate my case within racial capitalism, critical urban theory, abolitionist geography, and planning and intersects with critical environmental justice. Through CAPA we can gain an understanding of both radical praxis and planning against the growing carceral landscape, as they created an anti-policing infrastructure that aimed towards building community and resisting state violence. Such violence is maintained through police, military, and counterinsurgency programs both locally and globally, and through multiple levels of the State apparatus. In analyzing CAPA's work, I engage with questions of how community development is understood. One major analysis questions how an organization such as CAPA strategically brought about material changes for people and internationally aligned with marginalized and oppressed communities, while challenging enclosures (and foreclosures) which perpetually imprison and surveil community members? Additionally, what are the ways in which the creation of an anti-policing infrastructure was embedded in a larger movement for socio-spatial justice? By building an abolitionist infrastructure, CAPA challenged a linear path of development and the growth of the carceral state, working towards bottom-up development in South Los Angeles. My findings highlight how CAPA's work against state-sanctioned violence through everyday processes and programs, shifts development away from a Western discourse and towards a decolonial, community planning and praxis, including reconceptualizing modes of resistance and how radical infrastructures challenge everyday practices of domination.