From four leading abolitionist organizers, a much-needed intervention arguing that the systems and services that purport to protect children make our communities less safe and more precarious.

Based on decades of shared organizing, study, and lived experience, the contributors to How to End Family Policing argue that the criminal legal system cannot build genuine safety. Rather than the misleading language of “child welfare” and “child protective services,” scholars and activists use the term “family policing” to name the fact that these institutions and practices are neither neutral nor benign.

Black, Indigenous, and Latinx parents do not mistreat their children at higher rates than white parents. Yet 53 percent of all Black children in the United States will experience a child protective services investigation before the age of eighteen. In New York City, 90 percent of reports made to child protective services involve Black or Latinx children. In Minnesota, Indigenous children are 1.7 percent of the total population yet 25.8 percent of the young people in foster care.

With first-person testimony, examples of campaigns to build alternatives to family policing, and definitions of key concepts, this is an urgent call to build authentic and flourishing communities.

With contributions from Dorothy Roberts, Shira Hassan, Brianna Harvey, and Jasmine Wali, Corey B. Best, jaboa lake, zara raven, Ignacio G. Hutía Xeiti Rivera, Leah Plasse, E. Zimiles, Annie Chambers, Margaret Prescod, Arneta Roger, jasmine Sankofa, Noran Elzarka, Elizabeth Ling, Kylee Sunderlin, Shawn Koyano, Lisa Sangoi, and the editors.