Despite being both a designer in my paid work and a police and prison abolition organizer in my non-paid work, I've seldom reflected on the relationship between both worlds. That is, until @adseanlewis and I co-wrote a piece called Abolish the Cop Inside Your (Designer’s) Head.

In it, we tried to unravel the links between design and policing. We posit that there are 3 main connections:

First, and most obviously, design creates the tools and products of policing. Designers created every stun gun, detention facility, and data dashboard that police use.

Second, policing uses the tools of design thinking to legitimize itself, particularly by focusing on user experience and "procedural justice," a term coined by academics to describe how the public *perceives* the fairness and justness of policing, regardless of outcomes.

Instead, interventions like implicit bias trainings are intended to improve the public’s *perception* of the police and enhance police legitimacy. But none of them limit the use of force, reduce instances of police violence, or address the negative social outcomes of policing.

Third, and most perniciously, we started to notice that design and policing both rely on and reproduce the same ideologies:

- Commodification of Rights
- Discrimination
- Disposability and Extraction
- Dominance
- Empathy
- Incrementalism
- Individualism
- Myth of Objectivity

- Surveillance
- White Supremacy Culture

This lead us to wonder whether design and policing lead to similar outcomes.

As such, designers should not only stop designing for policing, but they also need to resist using the ideologies of policing in designing *everything else.*

So how do we do that?

We want designers to refuse to work for prisons, cops, ICE, immigration detention, the military, and on all the products, services, technologies, and built environments used by policing. We also call on designers to stop producing and amplifying copaganda.

But we also need designers to recognize the ideologies of policing in their own work and seek to undo them.

To that end, we conclude the article by offering some ways designers can start building an Abolitionist Design praxis.

I'm very curious to hear your thoughts on these!

To read the full article, you can access it here if you have (or are willing to purchase) a subscription to the Design Museum Magazine: https://designmuseumfoundation.org/abolish-the-cop-inside-your-designers-head/

Otherwise, you can also read it in the PDF available here: http://bit.ly/designandpolicing

This article is a part of a special issue of the @design_museum magazine, all dedicated to policing, and how policing functions by design. @jenrittner expertly edited this issue, and I invite you to check it out:

https://designmuseumfoundation.org/publication/the-policing-issue/

Thanks for engaging and signal boosting!