Today, we welcome back to the show professor Alex S. Vitale, author of the book The End of Policing, which has become an indispensable text for the rising movement to defund the police.

For this interview, he and Allen discuss the militarization of the police, cops in schools and the school-to-prison pipeline, the local work of organizations like Freedom, Inc., the value of restorative justice, how to make places safer without relying on police presence, and what it might actually look like to defund the police.

Alex S. Vitale is professor of sociology and coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College. He is the author of The End of Policing (Verso, 2017), which is currently available as a free ebook on Verso’s website.