Erica Perry has spent years on the front lines of the police abolition movement. An organizer with the Memphis, Tennessee, chapter of Black Lives Matter and a lawyer with Law For Black Lives a national attorney group founded in 2014 just after the Ferguson uprisings her activism has been informed by a childhood immersed in Black liberation and theology.

She was raised in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which she says has consistently, historically, been a part of radical movements. And so I come [to this work] in that lineage of asking: How do I address the suffering of our people, and recognize that this is a systemic issue? How do I organize and provide legal support for other organizers who are taking on unjust, anti-Black, and oppressive systems? And that just comes from a deep place of love.

Its from that place of love, that tradition of caring, that Perry came to the movement to end policing as we know it. Proponents say that the police, with ballooning budgets and increased militarization, undermine the safety and health of communities. They argue that the U.S. criminal justice system has at every level from law enforcement to courts and prisons not only failed at public safety but actively harmed Black and brown communities through hyper-criminalization and overincarceration.

Abolition refers to a world in which people dont need to rely on police or prisons these punitive and carceral systems in order to thrive, said Mon Mohapatra, co-author of #8toAbolition , a campaign designed to build a society without police or prisons.