Policing in Europe: disability justice and abolitionist intersectional care

Over the last few years, the intersections between mental health and punitive violence have gained more attention within scholarship and activism around race and policing. Disability justice and intersectional approaches have argued that the discourses around and categorisations of various forms of disability are deeply rooted in projects of colonialism and enslavement, and their legacies. These discourses are strongly enacted in contemporary logics and practices of policing, as racialised people who identify or are categorised as mad, neurodiverse, mentally ill, psychiatric survivors and disabled are particularly vulnerable to police harassment and violence. This article discusses how policing is deeply intertwined with discourses around saneism – institutional and systemic oppression of people who identify, have been diagnosed as, or are perceived to be, mentally ill, which has implications for abolitionist intersectional thought and practice. Foregrounding a black feminist abolitionist analysis, in dialogue with intersectional disability justice and mad studies, the author argues that an accountable engagement with the mad analytics of policing of black lives has important implications for intersectional and abolitionist thought and activism as forms of care/ing for black lives.