The suggestion that social workers should join precincts denies the reality that this strategy will not fundamentally change even one of the myriad harms inflicted, on the very communities we claim to serve, by police. There is little evidence that our presence will reduce their disproportionate use of lethal force against Black, Latinx and Indigenous people; it will not prevent them from patrolling certain communities over others while serving the interests of gentrifiers; it will not demilitarize them; and it will not hold them accountable for misconduct or abuse.

Syllabus for an Intro to PIC abolition course being offered at the Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice at the University of Chicago.

Syllabus for a course connection Abolition and Social Work being taught at the Columbia School of Social Work.

This talk explores the historical and contemporary harms of the social work profession and asks whether it is capable of transformation, or if it is irreparable and in fact obsolete.

Social work, historically and today, has been deeply embedded in systems of carceral control. With social work's legacy of ties to policing and oppressive family regulation through the child welfare system, the social work community is actively imagining and working towards a social work rooted in abolition, turning to traditions of resistance that also characterize its history.

To transform social work, we must first reckon with how it is carried out now, as well as within the past. Social work’s reckoning must include confronting our complicity in colonization, in racial capitalism and the logics of neoliberalism, and in our relationship to the carceral state, all of which have become core to social work practice.

At a time when old systems are being exposed as racist, cruel and unjust, social workers must think hard about where we choose to be aligned.