INTRODUCTION
how policing relates to law and democracy, in principle and in practice (the two often diverging dramatically). These authors diverge too, on the question of whether a genuinely democratic form of law could exist without the need for any violence to enforce it – which might prompt us to ask how far our current concepts, such as ‘law’, can be stretched to describe worlds so radically different from our own as to allow for truly equal participation in political decision-making. but anyway, inside this language / there is no word for sky Sarah Lamble and Melanie Brazzell go on then to challenge an assumption at the heart of the criminal law: that obedience to rules is the best way to understand what it means for human beings to treat each other well. They engage with the many concrete alternatives to policing – including transformative justice and community truth and reconciliation projects – that are already being practised and could be made part of our day-to-day lives in the here and now. By unpicking the ‘punitive habits and logics’ that exist in our normal ways of doing things, especially the impulse always to respond to harm through the infliction of further harm, they help us to avoid the trap of policing our own movements.15 the present apocalypse is / a structural problem Finally, Vanessa Thompson draws multiple strands of the book together to illuminate our current moment of crisis.
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