Celeste Winston

"How to Lose the Hounds" is a guide for police abolition. This monograph asks how marronage, the practice of flight from and placemaking beyond slavery, anticipated future Black refusals of policing. In answering this question, the book centers Black communities in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC that have been continuously subjected to violent excesses of police power from slavery until the present day. While Black communities are seemingly impossible sites for understanding life beyond policing due to the long history of anti-Black police violence, there is an equally long and ongoing historical geography of Black freedom struggles that provides critical lessons for why we must, and how we can, reimagine public safety and community well-being without police.