In a myriad of urban areas, communities of color are being heavily policed by increasingly militarized and extremely funded forces while being severely underserved educationally. Some cities’ leadership see the solution to high crime rates to be higher policing, whereas research shows that better educational and community resourcing is more effective. The only reason that policing and incarceration has been pushed so strongly in political agendas is to support the private prison sector that has become huge in the U.S., as well as increasingly effective at restraining Black, Latinx, and Indigenous peoples. The city of Memphis has one of the highest rates of police spending, especially when compared to the city budget as a whole. We are 12th in the country at 38% of our entire city budget going towards police and 27th in overall police spending in the nation (Turner 2020). This has been aggravated by the US Attorney General’s new plan in 2019, Operation Relentless Pursuit, which awarded Memphis more money than any other city ($9.8 million) for more police (City 2020). 

Included in this discussion must also be the theory of necropolitics, which people are remiss to apply to schools even though it fits perfectly. Necropolitics explores contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death and how this forces some people to remain in different states of being located between life and death by man-made “death worlds.” Death worlds are spaces with living conditions that only allow people to barely survive. Necropower is a specific structure where death, terror, and freedom are interlinked. Hyper-policed schools in hyper-policed communities is a cyclical death-world for Black and Brown students involved, where they are in a constant state of terror in their neighborhoods where they feel at risk of being killed simply for going outside, in a space where their family members are often-times dead or in prison (a separate death world) for similar reasons, then going to a potential safe place (school) only to be stripped of their freedoms and policed in similar ways (Mbembe). This theoretical discussion is key to understanding the underlying nuance as to why defunding (and eventually abolishing) police is such a huge deal in places like Memphis.