Daily Archives: June 6, 2020

The call to defund the police has become a rallying cry at protests across America this week, and some lawmakers appear to be listening.

Activists who have long fought to cut law enforcement budgets say they are seeing an unprecedented wave of support for their ideas, with some elected officials for the first time proposing budget reductions and divestments from police. Heres what we know about the movement, and how cities and states are responding.

For years, community groups have advocated for defunding law enforcement taking money away from police and prisons and reinvesting those funds in services. The basic principle is that government budgets and public safety spending should prioritize housing, employment, community health, education and other vital programs, instead of police officers. Advocates argue that defunding is the best way forward since attempts to reform police practices over the last five years have failed, as evidenced by the brutal killing of George Floyd. Groups have a range of demands, with some seeking modest reductions and others viewing full defunding as a step toward abolishing contemporary police services.

In the past four decades, the cost of policing in the US has tripled and is now $115bn, according to a recent analysis. That steady increase comes as crime has been consistently declining. In most cities, spending on police is significantly greater than spending on services and other departments ($1.8bn on police in Los Angeles, for example, which is more than half the citys general fund). The Covid-19 economic crisis has led cities and states to make drastic budget cuts to education, youth programs, arts and culture, parks, libraries, housing services and more. But police budgets have grown or gone largely untouched until pressure from protests this week.

Almost overnight and in direct response to protests, some mayors and other elected leaders have reversed their position on police funding. The mayor of LA said he would look to cut as much as $150m from the police, just two days after he pushed forward a city budget that was increasing it by 7%. A New York councilman has called for a $1bn divestment from the NYPD. In Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, San Francisco and other cities, local policymakers have expressed support for some form of defunding or opposing police budget increases. Most radically, in Minneapolis, councilmembers have discussed potentially disbanding the embattled police department altogether.Colleges, public school systems, museums and other institutions are also divesting from police.

The change in direction is monumental, but the size of the proposed cuts is not, activists have said. In LA, Black Lives Matter has been pushing for a peoples budget that allocates just 5.7% of the general fund to law enforcement, instead of the 51% of the mayors plan. More broadly, longstanding abolitionist groups, such as Critical Resistance and MPD 150, argue that the cities should not be looking for minor savings and cuts, but should be fundamentally reducing the scale and size of the police force and dismantle the traditional law enforcement system. That can start with finding non-police solutions to the problems poor people face, such as counselors responding to mental health calls and addiction experts responding to drug abuse.

Abolition groups argue that policing and prison are at their core racist and harmful and make communities less safe. They also point out that the vast majority of police work has nothing to do with responding to or preventing violence, and that police have a terrible track record of solving murders or handling rape and domestic violence.

While there is no contemporary example of defunding in the US, there are studies suggesting that less policing could mean less crime. In 2014 and 2015, New York officers staged a slowdown to protest the mayor, arguing that if they did less police work, the city would be less safe. But the opposite turned out to be true. When the officers took a break from broken windows policing, meaning targeting low-level offenses, there was a drop in crime. Researchers posited that aggressive policing on the streets for petty matters can ultimately cause social disruption and lead to more crime. Policing that punishes poverty, such as hefty traffic tickets and debts, can also create conditions where crime is more likely. When New York ended stop and frisk, crime did not rise.

Americas powerful police unions have long resisted even minor reforms and accountability measures, and are predictably arguing, without evidence, that budget cuts at any scale will make cities less safe. Theyve cited looting and property damage amid protests this week to suggest that cities dont have enough officers. Defunding advocates, however, have pointed out that the highly militarized response to peaceful demonstrations and the aggressive and at times violent ways officers are handling protesters has only provided further evidence that police cause harm (when there is no public safety threat in the first place).

Americas legacy of racism and severe gun violence epidemic make it difficult to compare to other countries. But some have pointed out that compared to peer nations, the US spends significantly less on social services and more on public safety programs, and has astronomically higher incarceration rates. These investments in police and prison, however, dont translate to a safer country. In fact, police in America kill more people in days than many countries do in years.

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What does 'defund the police' mean? The rallying cry sweeping the US explained - The Guardian

Last Wednesday, University of Minnesota president Joan Gable announced in a statement that the university will no longer enlist the Minneapolis Police Departments services for additional law enforcement support. Gable also announced the university will discontinue contracting with the department for additional support needed for university events, including football games, and any specialized services, such as K-9 explosive detection units.

The divestment arrives on the heels of the gruesome killing of George Floyd, a black Minneapolis resident who died after MPD officer Derek Chauvin was seen with his knee on Floyds neck during an arrest May 25. Floyds last words as he cried out for his mother were all too familiar: I cant breathe. While the department would later report Floyds death as a medical incident, years of evidence to the contrary, as well as eyewitness accounts that include a widely circulated video of the encounter, make clear this was no accident.

But while much attention has been given to Gables statement, which is among the more powerful actions any postsecondary institution has taken in the wake of police-involved killings, considerably less focus has been given to the student leader who issued the demand of divestment on behalf of the student body in her own letter a day before. On that Tuesday, Jael Kerandi, a black woman and undergraduate student body president at the University of Minnesota, authored a letter addressed to Gable along with other university officials and the campus chief of police. Citing data from the Mapping Police Violence project, Kerandi disclosed the clear racial disparity in which the Minneapolis Police Department especially has killed black people at a rate 13 times that of their white counterparts.

Kerandi also noted the departments long historical legacy of racism and racial terror, invoking the names of black men and women who have fallen victim to citizen vigilantism and MPD violence since the late 1960s. In concluding her letter, she rightfully dismissed common approaches that the university had taken to engage in dialogue or mediation with police. Instead, and quite unequivocally, she announced the collective demand that the university cease any partnership with the Minneapolis Police Department immediately.

In 2015, similar to Kerandis action, student demands from 86 institutions called for campus police reform. Those demands explicitly linked policing to institutionalized racism in higher education and revealed a desire from black students and other students of color to be protected from police violence and racism. While some demands expressed critical hope in reforms to ensure protection from police violence and racism, students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill expressly called for prison and police abolition. But with the continued flagrant violence toward black people at the hands of police, Kerandis final analysis overwhelmingly demonstrates that, far too often, the only relationship possible between police and black and brown people is one that eventually results in death.

To be sure, the concepts of divestment and police abolition are anything but new, although postsecondary institutions have only more recently seriously considered them as a result of student activists demands. Students have long advocated for colleges and universities to reassess their relationship to and divest from police as well as prisons. In fact, just two days ago, the Student Government Association at Ohio State University demanded the university cut ties with the Columbus Police Department. In recent years, police abolition has gained broader popularity in the United States as a result of black social movement organizations like the Dream Defenders, Black Youth Project 100 and the broader collective Movement for Black Lives -- many of which were co-founded by and include college students and young alumni. At the same time, the increased visibility and consumption of digital media depicting the extrajudicial killings of black people has all but legitimized the need for discussing a world without police.

Unfortunately, however, while it is an important model for reimagining higher education, Gables strong follow-up to Kerandis letter and explicit commitment to divest from MPD is an outlier for postsecondary leaders. Whats more, the announcement itself brings into focus the visible (and invisible) relationships between the institution of policing and higher education.

From the inception of the first campus police department in 1894 at Yale to the numerous armed postsecondary departments across at least 44 states, police on college and university campuses have existed for decades. But despite increased public scrutiny and the documentation of police-involved killings, private institutions, state universities and community colleges are continuing to expand campus policing and partnerships with local law enforcement.

Johns Hopkins University and Mt. San Antonio College recently established fully-fledged police departments. Fresno State University supplements its campus police department with partnerships with three public law enforcement agencies. Even at our own university, the use of the Los Angeles Police Department as additional security for students rightfully protesting a talk by xenophobic provocateur Ben Shapiro was an effort financially subsidized by the undergraduate student government.

In part, this espoused need for more localized law enforcement emerged in the wake of the tragic killing of student activists at Kent State in 1970 by the National Guard. However, just a little more than a week later, city and state police shot and killed black student activists at Jackson State University, a historically black institution in Mississippi. These incidents justified a narrative that university-controlled campus police and formalized relationships with local law enforcement are better for students and the campus community. Police scholars contend that university-led policing follows a community-oriented approach, which is to say it is kinder and less aggressive. While campuses are certainly vulnerable to crime and incidents of mass violence, media stories have consistently shown the use of force by police against students of color generally and black students specifically. As such, the inherent contradictions of policing reveal a misplaced focus on individual safety and obscure the prejudicial violence of a deeply racist institution.

Given both the ongoing public visibility of police violence and its impact on and demands from racially minoritized students, colleges and universities are in an important moment in which they should critically interrogate their role in sustaining such an unjust institution. Further, postsecondary institutions must seriously consider divesting from police altogether. According to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the average budget for campus law enforcement is $2.7million, but that number can be higher, such as the $22million budget of the University of California Police Department. As state appropriations per student for institutions continue to trend downward, especially in the wave of furloughs and layoffs at colleges and universities across the country, these funds could be better spent to support student services, teaching and learning.

As police abolitionists, we question the espoused value of policing beyond serving as an apparatus for state violence. As higher education scholars who have conducted research on campus racial climate, student-community organizing and policing for nearly a decade, we also question the presence of police in educational contexts in which those they disproportionately brutalize and kill are expected to live, work and learn. In response to these questions, we believe there is an undeniable moral imperative for postsecondary institutions to divest from the use and supplementation of local police departments for law enforcement.

Simultaneously, a parallel investment in structures and resources that humanize and offer dignity to racially minoritized students and communities is desperately needed. This historic moment provides an opportunity to envision new approaches to safety and community well-being that are grounded in compassion and the value of human life. We find this especially important as the contested decisions to reopen campuses this fall are accompanied by policy considerations to heighten surveillance, restrict movement and other tactics consistent with a police state likely to be enforced by law enforcement agencies.

Both the xenophobic, anti-Asian rhetoric associated with COVID-19 as well as its specifically devastating impact on black communities only further stigmatize groups already vulnerable to state control and police brutality. Hence, as higher education news stories continue to highlight pandemic-driven changes, the divestment from police (toward the end of abolition) is an absolutely necessary consideration.

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On the heels of the George Floyd killing, colleges have a moral imperative to not work with local police (opinion) - Inside Higher Ed

While protesters for Black lives across the country are being met with the same kind of brutalizing behavior that led them to the streets in the first place, many are beginning to consider whether the institution of policing can be saved at all. Leading the charge is an increasingly broad and diverse group of organizers, academics, and even politicians who have begun to consider whether the twin institutions of policing and incarceration are worth the suffering they seem incapable of evading. Though the abolition of prisons and policing is often dismissed as unimaginably radical, these advocates contend that our communities would be safer and healthier were we to divert the funds we spend on these measures towards bettering economic, housing, and health outcomes in the most vulnerable neighborhoods.

It may be difficult for many of us to begin to imagine public safety and accountability that does not rely on police and prisons, but two modern cartoons,Rebecca Sugars Steven Universe andNoelle Stevensons She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, are both replete with abolitionist themes that can inspire us to commit to new ways of keeping each other safe.

Image via Cartoon Network

In Steven Universe, Steven and the other Crystal Gems use bubbling to hold in stasis the gem monsters they defeat. Unlike incarceration, bubbling doesnt actively harm the gem monsters, but Steven recognizes as early as Season 1s Monster Buddies that the Crystal Gems should seek to heal the corruptiondescribed by Garnet as a tear in the fabric of the mindthat causes gems to turn into monsters rather than bubble them indefinitely.

In Season 3s Monster Reunion, Steven discovers that the gem monsters were corrupted by experiencing violence: an analogy that holds true in the real world, where experiencing childhood violence makes people more likely to later commit acts of violence themselves. The quest to heal and release the corrupted gems becomes a major narrative arc of the show, concluding in Change Your Mind when Steven and the Diamonds who were responsible for the violence that created the corruption in the first place work together to begin to repair the harm theyve caused.

But Steven Universes abolitionist ethic isnt limited to pursuing an alternative to bubbling; it also governs how the Crystal Gems reintegrate various antagonists back into society rather than discarding them, even when those antagonists have been responsible for sometimes unimaginable offenses. Lapis Lazuli turned the Crystal Gems over to Peridot, who tried to kill them. Spinel tried to destroy Earth. The Diamonds successfully completed countless whole-world genocides.

Image via Cartoon Network

But Steven recognizes that these antagonists harmful behavior was usually rooted in various traumatic experiences; Lapis and Spinel, for instance, both spent thousands of years abandoned and trapped in isolation. Steven devotes nearly all of his energy towards beginning to heal those traumas, rather than towards punishing the Gems for the harm theyve caused. By the end of the series, Lapis, Peridot, Spinel, and the Diamonds are all in community with Steven and engaged in ongoing reparative and transformational work on themselves and each other.

Steven Universe also recognizes that none of us are immune from engaging in harmful behavior; all of the trauma Steven experiences catches up to him in Steven Universe: Future, and he himself becomes corrupted and turns into a gem monster. But his community, now well-versed in resolving disputes and healing trauma, responds in kind, with Garnet explaining, As long as he believes hes a monster, hell stay one. This community support helps Steven recover his humanity.

In She-Ra, the protagonists similarly avoid a retributive response to characters who engage in harmful behavior. Both Scorpia and later Catra (major foils for Adora and her friends throughout the first three seasons) are welcomed into the Rebellion once they make a commitment to abandon the Horde. And just as in Steven Universe, there is no clearly delineated division between bad antagonists and good protagonists. Entrapta joins the Rebellion, but often seriously hurts her friends and allies with her blind pursuit of technological advancement; Glimmers willingness to use the Heart of Etheria weapon against the wishes of her allies in Season 4 exposes the planet to incredible danger.

Image via Netflix

This is not to say that the reintegration of any of these characters back into their communities is effortless or simple. Both the offenders and those close to them often face a lengthy struggle to process the physical and emotional consequences of the harm done. But because time and resources arent spent on incarceration and retribution, this ongoing, difficult, interpersonal work gets the energy it needs to be successful.

The abolitionist ethics of Steven Universe and She-Ra start with seeing the full humanity of wrongdoers, as opposed to reducing individuals to the worst decisions they have made. It requires a persistence and a dedication to these values. Adora continues to seek to bring Catra back into community despite Catras repeated incalcitrance; Steven makes the same efforts with Peridot and Lapis. It also requires holding offenders accountable to a commitment to repair. Yellow Diamond explained her approach to this commitment, After all the damage Ive done, its only right to use my powers for a little reconstructive work on the gems Ive hurt.

Anyone curious about how safety and accountability might work without the policing and prisons weve come to rely on need look no further than the examples set by Steven Universe and She-Ra. Perhaps the question is not whether we can imagine this kind of world, but whether we have the fortitude to build it.

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Do We Need the Police? 'Steven Universe' and 'She-Ra' Suggest We Don't - Collider.com

Here's what's true no matter how you look at the events of the last week:

Cops and vigilantes are continuing the disproportionate extrajudicial killing of Black people in America.

Police departments around the country are armed with state-of-the art riot gear, and even supplied with decommissioned military equipment (through a program that began under the Clinton administration in the 1990s).

Hundreds of thousands of people are willing to gather en masse despite a global pandemic.

This country is experiencing an economic crisis on a scale unseen since the Great Depression.

One's interpretation of just about everything else that's unfolded as people took to the streets in protest over the police killings of George Floyd in Minnesota, Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, Tony McDade in Florida, and countless others, will depend on one's life experiences, political persuasions, and where one gets information. Narratives of the nationwide protests range from "the peaceful demonstrations were disrupted by unhinged cops who want to sow chaos to discredit the Black Lives Matter movement," to "outside agitators and antifa are instigating riots and looting to destroy America." Amid the chaos of millions of simultaneous events flashing across screens and streets, how might one understand the call to abolish the police?

Police and prison abolitionists, as we've explained over the years, do not subscribe to the idea that policing is somehow "broken" and in need of reforms. They do not see an idyllic past in which policing "worked" for communities of Black, poor, or queer people, for people experiencing domestic violence, housing discrimination, and other forms of state and interpersonal oppression. Instead, abolitionists proposeand indeed demonstrate through their workthat community order can be maintained without the intervention of an armed representative of the government and that justice can be accomplished without punishment.

Abolition can be challenging to imagine because many assume that the absence of harsh punishment for behavior considered to be socially harmful or unacceptable will lead to increased disorder and violence. But abolitionists tend to point out that America's prison-industrial complex and the increasing militarization of police hasn't rooted out endemic pathologies like pedophilia, or mental illnesses that drive people to behave in socially frowned-upon ways, or made people less poor. Indeed, as abolitionist educator and organizer Mariame Kaba often argues, police abolition already exists for the wealthy. In communities with well-funded schools, food security, ample jobs, reliable transportation, and access to health carecommunities where people's needs are metpolice are mostly invisible. "People in Naperville are living abolition right now," Kaba told me in 2016. "The cops are not in their schools, they're not on every street corner." The abolitionist proposal is to redirect the resources the state has allocated toward prisons and police for decades toward community-directed and community-endorsed education, health care, food, jobs, and housing.

"We have this abolitionist framework where we want to see the policing institution dismantled and we want to see it transformed into something that centers community and restorative justice," said organizer Kofi Ademola, an adult mentor with GoodKids MadCity, as he prepared to march in the demonstrations on Saturday. "The minimum [police officer salary] is a good salary to start on. If you gave folks in a community $65,000 a year to keep their communities safe you'd see communities transformed."

But, Ademola said, abolitionist work is gradual and long-term; changing a society that took hundreds of years to reach its current form takes time. "As we reach towards that goal we still have to think about harm reduction," he said. "We don't believe abolition will happen overnight."

Harm reduction usually marshals community resources to fill in gaps left (or created) by the state and the private sector. It takes the form of mutual aid networks that collect money and essential items and redistribute them to people in need, or bail funds that get people accused of crimes out of pretrial detention in dangerous jails, or collectives that offer child care, transportation, and medical services, or reclaiming abandoned land to feed the neighborhood. It may look like charity, but abolitionist organizations tend to eschew the private philanthropic models of large nonprofits which they see as self-serving and out-of-touch with community needs.

On Saturday night, in a move that echoed Mayor Richard J. Daley's cordoning off of Black neighborhoods to confine riots within them after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Mayor Lori Lightfoot decided to kettle thousands of angry people in the Loop. The city lifted bridges, shut down the CTA, and imposed a sudden curfew, as cops brandishing weapons, tear gas, and handcuffs flooded the streets. Abolitionists at the Chicago Freedom School, meanwhile, opened their downtown office to offer shelter, food, and water to stranded protesters. As arrests surged (the city still hasn't been clear on how many people were detained over the weekend, but estimates range from 240 to 1,000), the Chicago Community Bond Fund was raising so much money to bail people out that their website crashed. On Monday morning, as Chicago Public Schools suspended its food distribution program for kids, community groups throughout the city mobilized to make and deliver meals.

"There were all these narratives in the media that Mayor Lightfoot has criticized Minneapolis PD and so I think a lot of people went down with the assumption that our police wouldn't mirror some of the activities we saw in Minnesota," said Richard Wallace, founder of the community organization Equity and Transformation, who participated in the demonstrations. "There are people who might have come to the protests who weren't radical but that left radical, or left abolitionist because of the way the city of Chicago handled that."

The organizers interviewed for this story all said that while the killing of George Floyd may have catalyzed the mass protests, people's rage has deeper roots. The structural, institutional inequities that lead to disproportionate police violence leveled against Black people is also fueling the grim statistics of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is disproportionately claiming Black and Latinx lives. (As Block Club Chicago recently reported, it's also led to disproportionate police enforcement of quarantine rules in Black neighborhoods.)

The pandemic "is laying bare how different our world could be and even more it's laying bare how terrible our world actually is," said Black Lives Matter Chicago organizer Ariel Atkins. "More and more people are being touched by what's happening personally and are way more awake than they have been in a long time . . . watching [the government] save corporations and banks, watching Jeff Bezos become a trillionaire while the people working for him are dying and being overworked and underpaid."

From the vantage point of abolitionists, the disease has also shown that the police, rather than being an institution that promotes safety, is one that's a threat to public health. "It's not insignificant that we had, in recent memory, two Black men whose last words were 'I can't breathe,'" said Page May, cofounder of Assata's Daughters, a youth political education group that runs a community garden to provide free produce to Washington Parkers, among other initiatives. "In a moment where everyone in the world is afraid of a respiratory illness that takes away our breath, it's a metaphor for how we've been living: We can't breathe. There's people on our necks literally and metaphorically."

As protests continue around the country, and the pandemic shows no signs of abatement, abolitionist organizers are expecting interest in their vision to increase. "There are more and more people every day that want to get plugged in and that makes the work more possible," said May. "I think people are seeing that no one is coming to save us and that it's up to us and we're all we got."v

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Police abolitionists find fuel in the protests - Chicago Reader

The two national teachers' unions have signed on to an effort to get Congress to create a federal standard for when police officers can use force, prohibit racial profiling, and end a program that provides surplus military supplies to local law enforcement, including school police.

In a Monday letter to congressional leaders, hundreds of organizationsincluding the American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Associationsay that these and other changes to police practices and oversight will "protect Black communities from the systemic perils of over policing, police brutality, misconduct, and harassment, and end the impunity with which officers operate in taking the lives of Black people."

The letter cites the recent deaths of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Ky., and other black people at the hands of police, saying that these incidents are examples of "abusive police practices" and "devastating state-sanctioned violence."

"We urge you to take swift and decisive legislative action in response to ongoing fatal police killings and other violence against Black people across our country," the letter states. "Federal statutory reforms are urgently needed on a range of policing issues, including use of force, police accountability, racial profiling, militarization, data collection, and training."

The support by the AFT and NEA for radical changes to law enforcement and protections for police officers highlights divisions within the labor movement that could grow. The extent to which teachers' unions cultivate an alliance with police unions on certain labor issues, but differ with them on other political issues, has been an interesting one for some time. Both teachers' unions have expressed concerns about the presence of police officers in schools, who disproportionately arrest black students.

In 2016, however, at a rally of Chicago teachers, then-Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis told the crowd,"Cops arenot our enemies. If they let us, we will make them more helpful. Our kids are not criminals." But later at the same rally, an activist from a different group, which had called for the abolition of police, told the crowd,"F--the police, f--CPD, and f--anybody who roll with them."

And some conservativeshave expressed unease about police unionsin addition to teachers' unions.

The AFT is an affiliated union of the AFL-CIO, and so is the International Union of Police Associations. Some activists want the AFL-CIO to end its affiliation with the police union.

The call in the letter to end a program that provides local police with surplus military supplies comes a day after Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, also called for its abolition. As we wrote Monday, this programknown as 1033has led to equipment such as grenade launchers and Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles ending up with police who work in schools.

Among other demands, the letter says that new legislation in Congress should:

Read the full letter below:

This article has been corrected to reflect the date the letter was sent by groups to Congress.

Photo: Motorists are ordered to the ground from their vehicle by police during a protest on South Washington Street on May 31 in Minneapolis. Protests continued following the death of George Floyd, who died after being restrained by Minneapolis police officers on Memorial Day. (AP Photo/John Minchillo)

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AFT and NEA Join Push for National Overhaul of Police Practices - Education Week

The United Daughters of the Confederacy have removed a Confederate monument a month early from an intersection in Alexandria, Va., Mayor Justin Wilson (D) said Tuesday.

Wilson said the group made the decision to remove the statue, Appomattox, ahead of schedule in light of severalcases of segregation-era Confederate monuments being defaced in protests around the country, The Washington Post reported.

Alexandria, like all great cities, is constantly changing and evolving. pic.twitter.com/CZTjlOkpfT

The statue was erected decades after the end of the Civil War in Alexandria's Old Town neighborhood.

The city has sought to remove the statue from public land for years, but it remained protected by state law. In April, Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam (D) signed a law allowing individual localities to move or remove Confederate monuments starting in July.

Im one of several electeds who have asked, 'why do we need to keep this up?' City Council member John Taylor Chapman said. Our community has changed. My first thought is of all the folks who tried for years to take it down to no avail. This change did not happen without change in the [General Assembly]. We as a community can get things done if we are persistent.

Weve tried really hard in the past few years to tell both sides, with the acquisition of the Freedom House, the Black History Museum, the Edmondson Sisters statue and others, Wilson told the Post,referring to a monument to two African American women who campaigned for the abolition of slavery after they were freed.

For a portion of our population, this statue was a symbol of an entire subjugation of a people. We still have a lot of work to do to ensure all of Alexandrias history is told, Wilson added.

The rest is here:

Confederate statue in Alexandria removed a month early | TheHill - The Hill

This may not sound like the right time to recommend a vrit documentary about good cops making a genuine effort to stop killing black civilians, but Peter Nicks 2017 The Force is a portrait of police reform that illustrates the futility of police reform, and an urgent film to watch in the wake of George Floyd and Breonna Taylors murders (among so many others) for the same reasons that it might initially seem like a reprehensible choice.

In 2003, the Oakland Police Department was placed under federal oversight following allegations that four veteran officers known as the Rough Riders had brazenly abused their power; as part of a settlement that paid a cumulative sum of $10.9 million to 119 plaintiffs, the OPD was required to comply with 51 court-ordered reforms aimed at eliminating systemic biases and establishing trust between the police and the citizens theyre meant to protect and serve. Just a few months later, the OPD responded to an anti-war protest at the Port of Oakland with such indiscriminate and overwhelming force that nine random bystanders longshoremen waiting to begin the days work were shot with rubber bullets.

Between 2000 (when the Riders suit was initially filed) and 2012, there were 87 officer-involved shootings in Oakland, 39 of which were fatal. Nineteen of the victims were unarmed. Nine were shot in the back. The OPD consists of roughly 750 cops, and yet dozens of them were somehow involved in multiple incidents of murder. Other abuses of power abounded: One officer pled no contest to charges of false imprisonment and civil rights violations after 16 Asian-American women accused him of groping them in his police car. Two black men were unlawfully forced to strip naked on a crowded street while their vehicle was searched.

Failing to implement the promised reforms, police chiefs were fired so often that the carousel of ineffective leaders began to camouflage the departments abject lack of progress. Five police chiefs came and went before 39-year-old Sean Whent was hired to oversee the OPD in 2014, the cool-headed Gen Xer pledging to finally overhaul what one attorney referred to as maybe the worst police department in the country and make adherence to the consent decree his top priority. That fall, after the murder of 18-year-old Michael Brown inflamed scrutiny of racist police violence nationwide, Whent either invited or permitted Nicks to embed himself behind the thin blue wall of silence and document Whents efforts to change the OPD from the inside out.

The first thing you notice about The Force is that Whent sincerely believed the film would be a good look for him, because he believed in the potential for his efforts to reform the OPD. And those efforts were not insubstantial. For starters, Whent openly confronts many of the critical truths that previous chiefs had tried to deny. Even the suspicion of misconduct can damage the trust weve worked so hard to build in this community, he tells a diverse classroom of new cadets at the beginning of the film. The nation was founded on a fundamental mistrust of government, and we are the most visible sign of that government. We give you tremendous authority, and a gun. Its not unreasonable for people to expect you to explain why you do the things that you do. Its the exact message you would hope impressionable new recruits have to hear before receiving their badges.

But the education doesnt end there. The OPDs 26-week training course also includes a visit from a prominent black pastor who comes in to screen footage of the Black Panthers and teach the recruits how the American police system evolved from 17th century slave patrols, making the the relationship between cops and the black community toxic before it really began.We watch as the cadets analyze and debate the body cam footage from a shooting, and experience what its like on the other side of a police encounter; we watch as the trainees are exposed to tear gas, and the beefiest guy among them is reduced from stone-faced stoicism to I cant breathe in a few seconds flat. Surely, you think, he will remember that feeling in his throat when he considers tear gassing someone in the field.

The Force gives its newest officers every opportunity to earn our sympathies. Nicks film is as restless as Frederick Wisemans are patient, but that approach only gives added weight to every humanizing excuse Whents department is afforded. Were told that the OPD is understaffed and stretched thin, but denied any super unsexy bureaucratic scenes in which the departments budget is discussed at length (the brevity of Mayor Libby Schaafs cameo appearance is telling in more ways than one).

We do, however, watch the officers fill out exhausting Use of Force reports a clerical headache that would make anyone think twice about unholstering their service weapon. We even come to know and like a bright-eyed trainee named Jonathan Cairo, and fear for his safety during a harrowing what would I have done? sequence towards the end of the film in which he pulls his taser on an agitated black man whose sister was just hit by a car. Cairo doesnt fire it though, and is ultimately able to deescalate the situation; hes the poster boy for a training program that halved the number of instances in which officers drew their guns on people. For a little while, anyway.

If you stopped watching The Force after an hour, youd swear it was state propaganda thats made all the more nefarious by its veneer of evenhandedness. Nicks a mixed-race filmmaker who served a year in prison on a federal drug charge almost certainly didnt embark upon the project with the intention of absolving the OPD of its sins. However, The Force also doesnt feel like it was made with the Trojan horse mentality of someone hoping to ambush Whents department from within.

Instead, the documentary is riveting for the way it seems torn between two different ways of looking at the same problem both of which insist that the OPD can serve as an example, but they disagree on what kind. Whent, a well-intentioned white administrator who mistakes palliative care for a legitimate cure, believes that reforming the beleaguered OPD would prove that every police department in this country can be redeemed. By hanging on Whents every word and allowing him to position himself as a white knight capable of bringing justice to the Black Panthers hometown, Nicks begins to argue the opposite with equal force: If the OPD cant be reformed, then none of the police departments in this country can.

Spoiler alert for anyone who doesnt know about systemic white supremacy: They cant, and lives are lost by how easily were fooled otherwise. Remember the attorney who said the OPD might be the worst police department in the country? That quote comes from a Politico article called How a Dirty Police Force Gets Clean. Later in that same article, the attorney takes stock of Whents administration and concludes that I think weve turned a corner. That article was published in March 2015 the OPD go on to kill four black men between June and August of that year alone.

However, that has nothing to do with why Whent is abruptly replaced on June 10, 2016: His noble experiment only comes to an end when he tries to cover up some misconduct that threatened to distract from the greater good his department was supposedly doing. Why let the fact that a few officers have been abusing the same underage sex worker get in the way of progress? Or, you know, the semi-convincing illusion of progress?

The Force is made all the more fascinating by how flat-footed Nicks is caught by that bombshell revelation. In a stark contrast to the transparency we see in the first hour, the last act of this documentary is an aggregated mess of local news footage and secondhand reporting; it feels like watching one of those unfinished Orson Welles movies that someone tried to staple together with odds and ends from the cutting room floor. Despite spending the better part of two years staring at the OPD in extreme close-up, Nicks missed the flagrant abuse of power that was happening right under his nose. After that, its hard not to laugh when Mayor Schaaf hires and fires three new police chiefs in the span of nine days.

Overwhelmed by the extent of the problem and scrambling to regain its perspective, The Force backs into a powerful conclusion that weve seen proven hundreds of times over on the streets of this country in just the last week: There is no real hope of healing a law enforcement system thats poisoned roots snake back to Americas original sin, and requires police to dehumanize the population they serve until they no longer recognize themselves in the eyes of those looking back at them. When your job is to look for the worst in people, even the good ones are able to find it (quotas make sure of that).

Add in powerful unions, qualified immunity, and all of the other extralegal aspects of the American police system that Nicks doesnt address by name, and youve got a slow-moving genocide thats been gathering momentum for hundreds of years; trying to fix it with a few personnel changes is like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Now imagine being surprised by the recent news that the OPD has been systematically undercounting its uses of force. There was a time when even Nicks himself might have been caught off guard by that revelation, but his relative naivete has served him well. Because his films open-minded optimism makes it susceptible to the same thinking that led Whent to shoot himself in the foot, The Force winds up arguing for the abolition of Americas police system in a way that a more straightforward piece of agit-prop never could; its destination feel especially credible even inevitable because it doesnt feel as if Nicks were aiming for it from the start.

Instead, he steers this wobbly ship into port with the inclusion of a climatic scene in which a group of black community organizers propose a civilian police commission that would be for, by, and accountable to the people (it was voted into law on the same day Donald Trump was elected President). The OPD lives on, but must now contend with a civilian body thats impervious to bullets. Its a start. The idea is not new, one of the organizers explains. The question is whether we have the moment in history right now and the collective will to actually make whats been the peoples demand for 50 years into a lived reality. They did then. We all do now.

The Force is streaming on Netflix.

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Stream of the Day: The Force Makes a Powerful Case for Why Police Reform Doesnt Work - IndieWire

The international outrage over the killing of George Floyd, spawning protests across America and around the world, has an urgency to it. The insistent call is for action, not just talk, no matter how impassioned.

Actions have to be specific. The scale of the protest may unintentionally dissipate the momentum for such concrete reform; when a great number of people are voicing a broad range of grievances, the general can become the enemy of the specific.

The specific issue at hand is police brutality against black men. Racist policing is a type of bad policing. A call about an alleged counterfeit $20 banknote that results in a death is very bad police work. Bad, abusive policing will have a greater impact on racial minorities. So it would be best to start there.

Abuses of power are corrected by preventing and punishing abusers, and limiting the power that can be abused

Police brutality is a species of abuse of power. Abuses of power are corrected by preventing and punishing abusers, and limiting the power that can be abused.

In the case of police officers, the prevention side is already quite advanced. For generations, major metropolitan police forces have had programs aimed at rooting out racism in the ranks, increasing the number of racial minority officers, initiatives in community policing, outreach measures to racial minority communities and the abolition of certain practices (carding, stop and frisk, chokeholds). There are monitoring and investigation measures, like dashboard and body cameras and the internal investigation bodies that attempt to reduce the temptation for police to cover up for their own.

All to the good, but no manner of such programs will reduce to zero those would abuse the fearsome power of the police. So the question of punishing abusers needs to be addressed.

In the Floyd case, the firing of the four officers involved in 24 hours, and the subsequent charging of all four (second degree murder and accessories to murder) within in weeks is highly unusual. There can be no doubt that the public outrage, sparked by the clear video evidence, drove the quick response.

The usual course of action is much more leisurely. Paid suspension pending a long investigation, charges (if any) of a lesser nature and a robust defence of the accused officers mounted by the police union. The criminal justice system is not seized by urgency.

In my favourite police show, Blue Bloods, Tom Selleck plays New York City Police Commissioner Frank Reagan. Dealing with a case of an officer who has choked a man in custody to death, Reagan informs the officer that the grand jury has declined to indict him.

They say a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich, but when a police officer acts in the line of duty suddenly they lose their appetite, Reagan says in a 2014 episode. Then Reagan fires the officer.

Thats television. In real life, the consequences are rarely that severe and that quick. Indeed, the officer who killed Floyd had a history of complaints that did not unduly impair his career. What made his case unusual was that he was fired immediately.

That needs to change. The power of police unions over disciplinary action needs to be dramatically diminished. Police unions are no different than other unions; they defend their members come what may. But that protection against employer exploitation can become a betrayal of the wider duty to serve and protect the public. Cities and metropolitan police forces need to negotiate with their unions swifter and more severe processes in cases of alleged abuse of power. And the privacy protections on allegations cannot be absolute; allegations of abuse of power and their resolution should be publicly available, whether the officer is disciplined or exonerated.

The power of police unions over disciplinary action needs to be dramatically diminished

All police forces have internal affairs or special investigations units to investigate corruption and abuse of power in the ranks. It is usually mandatory to engage such bodies when there is an officer-involved death. In areas where trust between the police and the public has completely broken down, those bodies should be removed from police departments altogether. Something like a special prosecutor office with a community relations liaison may be needed. Such a special prosecutions office would be more free to take aggressive action against abuse of power. The necessary close and collaborative relationship between the police and prosecutors is often an obstacle to policing the police.

Widespread protests against racism are apt for galvanizing energy. That energy now needs to be channelled toward concrete change in the abusive policing that killed George Floyd.

Back to the fictional Frank Reagan.

This job is not about being strong enough to use force; its about being strong enough not to.

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Raymond J. de Souza: To deter abusive policing, punishment must be swifter and more severe - National Post

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That second payment, because of the COVID-19 impact, has resulted in Fox Sports so far broadcasting only round one and the State of Origin bushfire relief match.

Ahead of the next payment, due in July, Foxtel is keen for a significant cut, pointing out there won't be a full season this year, the lengths of quarters have been reduced and there are no crowds.

Foxtel sources also pointed out on Friday it faces a challenge to re-sign subscribers who have been lost because of an economy that has shed thousands of jobs and is now officially in recession.

Seven, which contributes $150 million annually, wants to save between $30 million and $40 million in its rights bill this year and, for the remainder of this deal, until 2022, and in a two-year extension, have the 3 per cent annual inflation charge abolished.

Foxtel, at a minimum, is also seeking the abolition of the annual inflation figure. Foxtel sources suggest it is closer to confirming a revised deal for this year but needs more time to rubber-stamp an extension.

McLachlan is highly regarded for his deal-making skills but said on Friday he was unsure if a revised agreement until the end of 2024 would be brokered by Thursday, when the season recommences with a MCG blockbuster between Collingwood and Richmond. But he remains bullish a new deal will be forthcoming.

TV rights negotiations between Seven, Foxtel and the AFL are ongoing.Credit:Getty Images

"We will get there because we are long-term partners and we will work through it. There will be no problems," he said.

The NRL was able to secure a revised contract with Foxtel and Nine Entertainment Co, the publisher of this masthead, before its season resumed last week.

The broadcast rights are central to the AFL's financial health, and will have a major impact on the collective bargaining agreement negotiations between the league and AFL Players Association.

McLachlan said he was weighing up whether to attend the match on Thursday night.

"I would like to go to be honest, certainly for that first game, but I have to work in with the protocols and what's right and what is appropriate," he said.

"If I am there, I will be distanced from everyone else - I can assure you."

However, he was mindful of the "look" of him attending while members and supporters cannot.

"The heartbeat of our game is our members and supporters and they can't go. So, it's a challenge at being there at the opening and supporting our clubs and our players but also acknowledging that the heartbeat of the game can't be there," he said.

"It's, obviously, on my mind. I will work it out with the rest of the team over the next few days."

McLachlan said Fox Sports and Seven were still finalising how they would project virtual crowd noise into the broadcast, something that has successfully been done in the NRL.

He said the AFL would be ready to let supporters return to venues once approval came from state governments.

Jon Pierik is cricket writer for The Age. He also covers AFL and has won awards for his cricket and basketball writing.

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'There will be no problems': McLachlan bullish on AFL broadcast deal - The Age

Black Organizing Project members protesting at a school board meeting in March. Photo: Courtesy Black Organizing Project

Three months ago, during a special meeting of the Oakland Unified School District board of directors on March 4, dozens of parents, students, teachers and community members spoke out against millions in proposed budget cuts. One refrain was repeated over and over: If you must make cuts, dont slash classroom spending. Get rid of the police, first.

You have an opportunity to make a decision and do something radical, Jessica Black, a district parent, told the board at the time, referring to the idea of cutting ties with the school districts police force. Black is also a member of the Black Organizing Project, a group working towards racial justice in schools.

The money that is being paid to the police should go back to the schools to create better lunches, bring back after school programs, sports and mediation staff, a fourth grader at Manzanita Community School named Josiah told the school board. Stand with BOP, eliminate school police tonight.

Though a motion to cut three police officers failed in a four-to-three vote during that March meeting, activists have continued to pressure district leaders to remove police from schools.

Its an effort thats been ongoing in Oakland for years.

Since 2011, the Black Organizing Project has been campaigning to eliminate police from OUSD, the only district in Alameda County with its own police force. The district spends more than $6 million each year employing school police and security officers.

I represent the 36,000 students of OUSD. We all share the same feeling about police. The same thoughts. The same trauma. Police do not equal safety for us. Denilson Garibo

Now, OUSD is facing another round of budget cuts that could reach into the tens of millions. And its happening at precisely the same moment the national movement against police violence, sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis on Memorial Day, has focused attention on policing in schools.

In the days after Floyds death, the University of Minnesota severed ties with the Minneapolis Police Department, which was contracted to patrol the campus. Soon after, the Minneapolis Public Schools district followed suit and ended its contract with the same police department. Activists across the country are calling on other local school districts to do the same.

Organizers working to end school policing in Oakland think this could be a turning point. And with the coronavirus pandemic upending public education, they say its a perfect opportunity to radically change how schools function.

For years weve been doing this work and theres grassroots organizations across the country dedicated to a moment like this, said Jasmine Williams, a development and communications manager with the Black Organizing Project. The world is really ready to fight on behalf of black youth and families.

At a youth protest drawing 15,000 people in Oakland on Monday, students called for OUSDs board of directors to rid their schools of police.

The Black Organizing Project began campaigning to remove police officers from school campuses in 2011, after an Oakland school officer shot and killed 20-year-old Raheim Brown, who was sitting in a car near Skyline High School while a school dance was underway. The officer, Barhin Bhatt, claimed that Brown attacked his partner with a screwdriver and that there was a gun in the car. But Bhatts partner, Jonathan Bellusa, later cast doubts about the official version of events and OUSDs handling of the investigation. The district eventually paid $995,000 to settle two wrongful death lawsuits brought against OUSD over the police killing.

In the years since, BOP members have encouraged Oakland Unified to move away from policies that rely on punishment and policing, which can often lead to students becoming involved in the juvenile justice system a process sometimes referred to as the school-to-prison pipeline.

In 2012, BOP pushed the school board to establish a formal process for submitting complaints about school police officers. In 2015, they joined other community organizers to pressure district leaders to remove willful defiance as a reason for suspensions and expulsions after it was shown that Black students were disproportionately punished under the rule.

Oakland Unified is now considered a model for its implementation of restorative justice practices that focus on accountability instead of punishment.

Yet while overall suspension numbers have steadily decreased in Oakland, Black students are still suspended at higher rates than other racial groups. During the 2018-2019 school year, 57% of students suspended were Black, though they only comprised 24% of the student body.

Last year, BOP released its plan outlining how Oakland schools can eliminate police by 2020, by emphasizing peace-keeping instead of security, and investing in mental health and special education services.

With the district considering up to $35 million in cuts this month, District 5 Director Roseann Torres, an attorney, has been working with the Black Organizing Project to put de-funding the police back on the school districts agenda.

Torres favors eliminating the entire school police force, which includes a chief, two sergeants, seven sworn police officers and 57 school security officers who patrol on and around campuses. In the plan proposed by BOP, the school security officers, who do not carry weapons, would be re-trained in restorative justice practices, a form of non-punitive conflict resolution.

Under the proposed plan, the district could still rely on the Oakland Police Department in emergencies, while also creating a less intimidating environment for students without the constant presence of police in school, Torres said. Money currently allocated to police could then be re-invested in other student support programs, like restorative justice programs or school counselors.

Why do we have to spend another $6 million that were taking out of the mouths of children for resources? We can cry all day about not having a better budget, but how do we spend our budget? Torres said.

It was Torres who made a motion to have the OUSD police budget cut in March. That meeting grew contentious, with board members being heckled by supporters in the audience. The two student directors, Denilson Garibo and Mica Smith-Dahl, left the meeting in protest, feeling that they werent being heard.

In that moment I was just angry, disappointed and just sad, Garibo said. I represent the 36,000 students of OUSD. We all share the same feeling about police. The same thoughts. The same trauma. Police do not equal safety for us.

I dont know why it has to be a conversation about why our life matters and why we dont need to be policed at such a young age at school, Smith-Dahl told The Oaklandside. Children of Oakland dont deserve to have their bodies policed at school, which is a learning environment.

The world is really ready to fight on behalf of black youth and families. Jasmine Williams

At the March meeting, school board director Jumoke Hinton-Hodge raised questions about whether OPD officers are equipped to handle calls regarding students, but otherwise expressed her opposition to getting rid of school police.

I dont believe in abolition of [school] police officers for a number of reasons, Hinton-Hodge said at the meeting. I dont want OPD, untrained, not thinking about young people first, to be the first people I pick up the phone to call [in an emergency].

Torres amendment to cut police funding was rejected by a majority of the board, but some district leaders still seem amenable to the idea. When directors voted to cut $20 million in other areas, they also directed the superintendent to create a safety plan for police-free schools. The plan will be presented in the fall.

School board president Jody London, who voted no in March, told Oaklandside this week that she is awaiting the safety report before making a decision.

I hear the urgency from our community and understand their frustration, particularly in light of the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and others, London told The Oaklandside. I also have heard from a number of our leaders at school sites about why they support an internal safety program and staff who are trained in de-escalation and restorative practices and respond quickly to safety concerns on campuses. I support the direction we provided to the Superintendent in March, which allows us to have a plan in place to ensure safety.

Directors Gary Yee, Hinton-Hodge and James Harris, who also voted against the measure, did not respond to The Oaklandsides requests for comment. Directors Torres, Shanthi Gonzales and Aimee Eng supported the amendment.

Williams said the Black Organizing Project and its supporters will continue emailing and calling district leaders and speaking out at board meetings during the June budget discussions for the 2020-2021 school year. Theyre hoping that momentum, buoyed by the national mood, is on their side.

Its inhumane and unfortunate that lives have to be lost, students have to be pushed out of school and their quality of life impacted for people to understand this impacts real people, said Williams.

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For 9 years, the Black Organizing Project has been campaigning to remove police from Oakland schools. Will it finally happen? - Berkeleyside