Good Cop, No Cop?

Where is your imagination? This question runs throughout Sandy Hudson’s Defund: Black Lives, Policing, and Safety for All. The lawyer and activist is determined to challenge the uninspired thinking that prevents police reform. “It is dangerous to continue to put off the rigorous thought, debate, and hard work necessary to build the institutions of tomorrow,” she writes. “The idea that we cannot reimagine safety structures through our existing processes is one of several ways policing obstructs our democracies.”

To some, abolitionist visions might resemble speculative fiction. A society without traditional law enforcement isn’t easy to picture. Impunity has also been woven into the fabric of our society, making the complex justice system difficult to comprehend, let alone reform. Hudson knows this. As she points out, police budgets “make up millions — at times billions — of dollars, representing a significant slice of public investment.” The numbers bear her out. In 2023, the Toronto Police Service received $1.16 billion of the city’s $16.16-billion annual budget. In 2024, New York City allocated $10.8 billion (U.S.) to the NYPD. And in Los Angeles, even after some cuts were made in 2020, the biggest portion — over 20 percent — of the city’s recent $14-billion (U.S.) budget still went to the police.

Hudson makes clear that the momentum behind modern policing didn’t appear out of thin air: it was built, with the help of popular culture. “The police procedural is the lifeblood of the television entertainment industry,” she writes, arguing that crime investigation shows, which are “even more popular than sports,” give us a false sense of familiarity with legal processes. (As I read, I was reminded of nights in the late ’90s when programs like Cops played like a lullaby for the law-abiding.) Hudson is equally sharp on performative gestures from politicos, calling Justin Trudeau’s kneel in June 2020 — a symbol of the Black Lives Matter movement after the death of George Floyd — fury-inducing, given his lack of policy-based action.

Reading Defund feels like watching Hudson work a crowd. In seven chapters, she attempts to make abolition understandable to even the most dubious reader. The average person — who, unlike myself, has never had an officer pull a firearm on them over a misidentification — might hear a theory in need of proof. For many, though, she’s preaching what they already know.

Blending legal insight, cultural criticism, and first- and second-hand accounts from Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom, Hudson builds a case for a world where public safety is rooted in community care. She deliberately favours anecdotes over data dumps. At times, it’s as if she’s speaking before a panel of skeptical liberals — those who support incremental reform but resist the idea of anything radical. Anticipating hesitation, she focuses on concrete evidence rather than abstract ideas or a torrent of statistics. The result is a somewhat fractured argument that unfolds in pieces: less a searing, unapologetic piece of writing than a series of careful, persuasive stops and starts.

Hudson is fluent in both the language of the law and the tension of living within its confines. She seldom dips into autobiography, but we learn of her political coming of age during her time in law school at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she saw how deeply American jurisprudence is built on anti-Black discrimination; her co-founding of the Toronto chapter of BLM in 2014 following a series of police killings, including that of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri; and her media presence during the summer of 2020.

Indeed, her personal stories stand out. One poignant example unfolds on the streets of Toronto, shortly after a BLM memorial for Abdirahman Abdi, a Somali Canadian man who died during an arrest in 2016. “When we were done, we walked out into the darkness,” she remembers. “That’s when we heard screaming.” Hudson and a few other organizers saw a group of baton-wielding officers chasing an upset Black man until he “collapsed into a heap on the ground, crying.” They followed and shielded him from the threatening cops until he calmed down — after a friend explained that his mother had just died in his arms. Hudson often wonders “what would have happened had we not stepped in that night.” This memory is one of many that lead her to believe that “abolition is the only just and rational response one can take after examining how the police operate.”

When it comes to the history of law enforcement, Hudson offers a dose of disillusionment. She traces the origins of modern policing back to European efforts “to stamp out resistance” among both colonized and enslaved populations. She looks at Britain’s development of the Dublin Police in eighteenth-century Ireland, which replaced the British army there and “served as the basis” for other paramilitary forces around the world — including in Canada, where the North-West Mounted Police was founded in 1873. Hudson is fiercely critical of the RCMP and its predecessor for their violent attacks on Indigenous communities and cultures. “The RCMP’s colonial legacy was so effective,” she says of their role in taking control of land and redistributing it to settlers, “they assisted with the establishment of the apartheid system in South Africa.” The justice system, she argues, has always existed to protect power, not the public. “All police,” she insists, “are morality police.”

Hudson offers a few tangible options for maintaining public safety, all of which are grounded in support for mental health, housing, and education. Although imperfect, some of these initiatives are already under way in Canada: 24/7 non-police-led crisis teams, safe supply programs, and grassroots housing projects like the Toronto carpenter Khaleel Seivwright’s tiny shelters for unhoused populations. Abolition, as Hudson frames it, is defined not by absence but by presence — and she challenges her readers to wonder what could be built.

In Defund, Hudson’s critique is loud and unmistakable: the law, as it currently functions, does not protect people. She names this clearly, tracing a connection between policy, punishment, and the persistence of harm. But the shape of what should replace it? That’s more of a whisper. She admits to not having all the answers. Which is fine, because her work helps us to imagine what they might be.