Beyond Innocence Politics: Strategy for Abolition

Introduction

In every viral case of state violence, the same ritual unfolds. We rush to prove the victim was innocent. They were unarmed. They were polite. They were a good student, a parent, a veteran, a churchgoer. We assemble a moral résumé to persuade the public that this person did not deserve what happened to them.

It feels strategic. It feels humane. It feels like common sense.

But pause and look closer. What is the hidden premise of this appeal? That if the person had been guilty, flawed, criminalized, or defiant, the violence would be more understandable. That some lives require moral certification before we defend them. That state power is legitimate when deployed against the “right” targets.

This is the trap of innocence politics. It narrows the field of solidarity to the respectable. It turns movements into public defenders for exceptional victims instead of architects of collective liberation. It quietly reinforces racial, gender, and class hierarchies by sorting the worthy from the disposable.

If your movement wants to dismantle state violence rather than merely protest its excesses, you must step outside the moral courtroom. You must risk defending the guilty. You must refuse the politics of safety. You must design organizing practices that do not depend on purity.

The thesis is simple and dangerous: appeals to innocence reinforce the legitimacy of punitive power. Movements that want abolition must build solidarity beyond innocence and construct practices that share risk, cultivate accountability, and generate new forms of sovereignty.

The Moral Trap: How Innocence Politics Reinforces State Power

Every tactic hides an implicit theory of change. When you foreground innocence, your theory of change is persuasion within the existing moral order. You are arguing that the state made a mistake. You are not arguing that the system itself is structured to produce violence.

This distinction is not semantic. It is strategic.

The Sorting Machine of Respectability

Innocence politics operates as a sorting machine. It divides the population into two categories: those who deserve protection and those who can be abandoned. The criteria are never neutral. They track race, gender expression, class position, and prior contact with the criminal legal system.

When movements amplify cases involving passive, respectable victims, they invite liberal audiences to identify, empathize, and cleanse their conscience. Outrage becomes a ritual of moral purification. The public declares, “This is not who we are,” while the machinery of policing and incarceration continues uninterrupted.

Meanwhile, those who cannot be framed as innocent remain unprotected. Sex workers, drug users, undocumented people, gang-affiliated youth, formerly incarcerated neighbors. The people most exposed to state violence are often least eligible for the halo.

By centering innocence, movements accept the state’s definition of criminality. They concede that some people are legitimate targets. They merely contest misclassification.

Case Study: The Limits of Mass Moral Outcry

Consider the Global Anti Iraq War march on 15 February 2003. Millions gathered in over 600 cities to declare the invasion immoral. It was perhaps the largest coordinated protest in history. Yet the war proceeded.

Why? Because moral scale does not automatically translate into structural leverage. The protest made an ethical claim within the framework of international law and humanitarian norms. It did not alter the strategic calculus of those in power.

Innocence politics functions similarly. It produces enormous moral visibility without necessarily shifting institutional incentives. It can expose brutality, but exposure is not transformation.

The Comfort of the Courtroom

Appeals to innocence keep movements psychologically close to the state. You are arguing before an imagined jury of public opinion. You are asking for recognition. You are demanding that the law be applied fairly.

This courtroom posture narrows the horizon of struggle. It frames liberation as inclusion within existing protections rather than a reconfiguration of power. It suggests that the problem is bias, not the structure of punishment itself.

To be clear, strategic use of innocence can win reforms. Body cameras. Policy tweaks. Individual prosecutions. These are not trivial. But if your goal is abolition or deep structural transformation, innocence politics is a ceiling. It caps your imagination at reform.

The deeper question is this: what would it look like to defend people without asking whether they deserved what happened to them?

Defending the Guilty: Solidarity Beyond Moral Purity

The phrase “defend the guilty” is incendiary. It unsettles donors. It frightens liberal allies. It triggers internal anxiety.

Good. Movements that never unsettle their own moral reflexes cannot unsettle the system.

Criminalization as Racial Design

Criminal categories are not natural facts. They are political constructs shaped by racial and economic interests. The War on Drugs and the War on Terror did not simply target behavior. They targeted populations.

When you defend only the innocent, you accept the legitimacy of those categories. You imply that drug users, undocumented workers, or alleged cop killers fall outside your moral community.

Yet if policing itself is structurally violent, then the line between innocent and guilty is drawn by an unjust apparatus. Solidarity must therefore precede judgment.

This does not mean romanticizing harm. It means refusing to let the state monopolize the definition of harm.

The Emotional Economy of Exceptional Victims

There is another danger. Exceptional cases can become instruments for emotional relief among privileged supporters. The narrative of a blameless victim allows sympathetic observers to condemn racism while maintaining faith in the broader system.

The spectacle of innocence reassures. It suggests that if only we fix bias, justice will function.

Movements must resist becoming suppliers of emotional catharsis. The goal is not to help society feel better about itself. The goal is to dismantle hierarchies that produce disposability.

This requires a shift in narrative strategy. Instead of presenting victims as saints, tell the truth in full complexity. Show that even those who broke laws did not deserve execution, disappearance, or neglect. Human dignity cannot be conditional.

Occupy and the Policing of Tactics

During Occupy Wall Street, internal debates about property damage and confrontational tactics often revolved around optics and innocence. Participants worried that militant actions would delegitimize the movement.

The fear was not only about repression. It was about moral perception. Would the public see us as peaceful and deserving?

This anxiety constrained tactical imagination. It policed internal diversity. It reproduced a hierarchy between “good protesters” and “bad protesters.”

Every movement faces this tension. The question is whether you let respectability dictate strategy.

To defend the guilty is to say: our solidarity does not depend on optics. It depends on shared vulnerability under a punitive regime.

If innocence politics narrows solidarity, what practices can expand it?

Designing Risk-Sharing Spaces: From Rhetoric to Ritual

Rejecting innocence cannot remain a theoretical posture. It must be lived. It must reshape the architecture of your meetings, actions, and institutions.

Movements are ritual engines. The habits you repeat become your politics.

Confession and Commitment Circles

One powerful practice is the confession and commitment circle. Participants gather not to display purity but to name complicity. How have you relied on policing? How have you benefited from punitive systems? Where have you chosen safety over solidarity?

But confession alone breeds stagnation. Guilt without direction curdles into paralysis.

Anchor each admission to a concrete commitment within 48 hours. If you called the police during a neighborhood dispute, commit to joining a community de-escalation training. If you profit from gig work that depends on carceral logistics, redirect a portion of income to a bail fund.

Record these commitments in a public ledger accessible to members. Transparency transforms vulnerability into momentum. Accountability becomes shared rather than moralistic.

Rotating Roles and Abolishing the Backstage

Hierarchy often hides in logistics. The same people strategize. The same people take arrest. The same people cook. Expertise calcifies into status.

To embody solidarity beyond innocence, rotate roles deliberately. Let strategists negotiate bail. Let seasoned organizers facilitate healing circles. Let newcomers co design actions.

When everyone experiences multiple layers of risk and care, moral hierarchies soften. No one is only a hero or only a supporter. Mutual obligation replaces pedestal politics.

Ritualizing Collective Risk

Risk should not be accidental. It should be rhythmic.

Design a campaign cadence that includes planned moments of shared exposure. For example, use a lunar cycle model. New moon for planning and skill building. First quarter for direct action. Full moon for public storytelling. Waning phase for reflection and transfer of skills.

This rhythm trains participants to see risk as a cultivated practice rather than a crisis. It prevents the adrenaline spike and burnout cycle that destroys many movements.

Movements have half lives. Once power recognizes your pattern, repression accelerates. By cycling tactics and embedding risk in ritual, you exploit speed gaps. You crest and vanish before institutions fully coordinate.

Funding the Forbidden

Budgeting is political theology. What you fund reveals what you believe is possible.

Create an abolition budget line in every meeting. Allocate a percentage of funds to initiatives that courts would consider illegal or subversive. This might include jail support infrastructure, encrypted communication tools, or mutual aid for people with outstanding warrants.

Normalizing financial support for the criminalized erodes the innocence filter. It signals that your solidarity extends beyond those who test well in the court of public opinion.

Designing risk sharing spaces transforms rhetoric into daily practice. Yet risk without sovereignty is martyrdom. The next step is to build parallel authority.

From Protest to Sovereignty: Building Power Beyond the Courtroom

If you reject innocence politics, you cannot rely solely on pleading with existing institutions. You must construct alternatives.

The ultimate victory is not a sympathetic headline. It is sovereignty.

Community Defense as Parallel Authority

Cop watch patrols, community mediation circles, and rapid response networks are not merely service projects. They are embryonic forms of governance.

When neighbors resolve conflicts without police, they reduce reliance on punitive structures. When communities fund bail collectively, they disrupt the economic logic of detention. When local councils set safety protocols independent of state agencies, they practice self rule.

These initiatives must be more than charity. They must be framed as legitimate authority.

The Oka Crisis in 1990, when Mohawk communities defended ancestral land against development, illustrated how blockades can assert territorial sovereignty. The confrontation was not a plea for innocence. It was a declaration of jurisdiction.

Your movement should ask: where can we exercise decision making power now, even partially?

Measuring Sovereignty, Not Sympathy

Movements often measure success by crowd size or media coverage. But mass does not guarantee leverage. The Women’s March in 2017 mobilized millions, yet policy outcomes were uneven.

Shift your metrics. Count degrees of sovereignty gained. How many disputes were resolved without police? How many resources were redirected from punitive budgets to community infrastructure? How many participants learned skills that reduce dependency on state institutions?

This reframing changes strategy. It prioritizes durable capacity over spectacle.

Fusing Lenses for Durable Transformation

Most contemporary movements default to voluntarism. They believe that if enough people act together, power will bend.

Numbers matter. But structural timing, consciousness shifts, and even ritual dimensions also shape outcomes.

Structural crises such as economic downturns or public health failures create openings. Subjective shifts in collective feeling can spread faster than policy debates. Ceremonial acts can solidify commitment and courage.

Standing Rock demonstrated this fusion. The resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline combined blockade, legal challenge, spiritual ceremony, and global narrative. It was not innocence that drew support. It was sovereignty.

When you integrate multiple lenses, you reduce reliance on moral purity. You create a thicker fabric of change.

Putting Theory Into Practice

To move beyond innocence politics in daily organizing, adopt concrete practices that reshape culture and strategy:

• Institutionalize confession and commitment circles. Hold monthly sessions where members name complicity and pledge specific actions within 48 hours. Track commitments publicly to transform vulnerability into accountability.

• Rotate high risk and high care roles. Ensure that facilitation, arrest risk, media spokesperson duties, and logistical support circulate among participants. Break the division between heroes and helpers.

• Create an abolition budget. Dedicate at least 10 percent of funds to initiatives that directly support criminalized communities, including bail funds, legal defense, encrypted infrastructure, and mutual aid for those excluded from respectability.

• Adopt a campaign cadence. Use a recurring cycle for planning, action, storytelling, and reflection. This builds stamina, exploits institutional lag, and normalizes shared risk.

• Measure sovereignty gained. Replace head counts with indicators of self rule. Track how many conflicts are resolved without police, how much funding is diverted from punitive systems, and how many members acquire de-escalation or legal skills.

• Tell unsanitized stories. Refuse to airbrush victims into saints. Affirm human dignity regardless of criminal record or social status. Challenge audiences to confront systemic design rather than individual exception.

Each step shifts the center of gravity from moral appeal to material transformation.

Conclusion

Appeals to innocence are seductive because they promise quick legitimacy. They align with dominant moral frameworks. They generate sympathy.

But sympathy is not sovereignty.

If your movement confines itself to proving that certain victims did not deserve violence, it concedes that others might. It accepts the architecture of punishment and merely contests its misapplication.

To dismantle racial, gender, and class hierarchies that legitimize state violence, you must defend beyond innocence. You must share risk. You must confess complicity and convert it into commitment. You must fund the forbidden. You must build institutions that exercise power rather than petition it.

History shows that real transformation rarely looks respectable in its early stages. It looks unruly, ambiguous, even dangerous. That is because it challenges the rules of who counts and who decides.

The task before you is not to perfect your moral résumé. It is to construct forms of collective life where no one’s safety depends on proving their purity.

Are you ready to defend the next person harmed by the system without first asking whether they were innocent?