You can’t solve a disease with a symptom—their use of systems of punishment and carcerality to steer for more progressive enforcement just reaffirms those systems as intrinsically just, but in need of something fixing, instead refuse small concessions and completely abolish it.

I used to say this metaphorically to call attention to the limitations of policy change, reform, and other vacuous terms that hold little weight in relation to the gritty, grimy, rough and tough work necessary to creating a more just and sustainable world.

I knew, for example, calls for greater “police reform” is an attempt to treat a disease (police) with a symptom of that disease (policy). I knew campaigns for “community control” of the police were insufficient because of the pathological nature of what the community is attempting to control. Community control of an invasive pathogen, like police, increases risk of serious infection and the potential for community spread, while shifting responsibility and liability away from the state and towards those disproportionately harmed by the disease itself.

I knew personal liability insurance and body cameras would not stop police, corrections officers and border control from killing racialized people. I knew that because violence is standard operating procedure for cops, “police violence” was redundant. I knew attempts to distinguish between “good policing” and “bad policing” made policing itself not just theoretically possible, but legitimate. Even when my elementary school teachers would bring in actual police to class as an attempt to desensitize all the poor, black and brown children to cops, deep down, I knew that “Officer Friendly” was suspect. I knew all this because police routinely arrested and jailed my father for doing what he had to do to survive in spaces not meant for living.

These were the cops who fought in the “war on drugs,” vowed to keep the streets “clean,” “get tough on crime,” and weed out the “good” from the “bad” migrant. My father fit the description of the “bad” migrant – the one immigrant rights activists distinguish themselves from in slogans like, “We are not criminals.” The last time my father was arrested in this country [the United States] was around the start of 287(g) agreements that enabled Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) to cooperate with local police in order to round up “bad migrants.”

To clarify, INS was the predecessor to ICE. Sort of same shit, different toilet. Under the guise of “good border control,” INS deported my uncle in 1983, my father in 1996, and another one of my uncles in 2006. The border followed my family as soon as they crossed it. It followed them to Dorchester, Roxbury and other poor, urbanized space and reminded Boston Police to presume my family guilty until proven less guilty. So I learned fairly early that when it came to police there was no room for improvement. I learned that rights-based regimes would not protect my father for exercising his “right” to life and survival. Any attempt to tinker with, reform, or fix the system was tantamount to treating a disease with its symptoms. Despite what I learned and what I knew, I was not prescient enough, though, to see the potential for a literal application of this trusty metaphor in the not-yet-here- and nevertheless, here we are.