Daily Archives: June 15, 2020

Congressional Democrats want to make it easier to identify and prosecute police misconduct; Joe Biden wants to give police departments $300 million. But efforts to solve police violence through liberal reforms like these have failed for nearly a century.

Enough. We cant reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police.

There is not a single era in United States history in which the police were not a force of violence against black people. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 1700 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway slaves. In the North, the first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the rich. Everywhere, they have suppressed marginalized populations to protect the status quo.

So when you see a police officer pressing his knee into a black mans neck until he dies, thats the logical result of policing in America. When a police officer brutalizes a black person, he is doing what he sees as his job.

Now two weeks of nationwide protests have led some to call for defunding the police, while others argue that doing so would make us less safe.

The first thing to point out is that police officers dont do what you think they do. They spend most of their time responding to noise complaints, issuing parking and traffic citations, and dealing with other noncriminal issues. Weve been taught to think they catch the bad guys; they chase the bank robbers; they find the serial killers, said Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, in an interview with Jacobin. But this is a big myth, he said. The vast majority of police officers make one felony arrest a year. If they make two, theyre cop of the month.

We cant simply change their job descriptions to focus on the worst of the worst criminals. Thats not what they are set up to do.

Second, a safe world is not one in which the police keep black and other marginalized people in check through threats of arrest, incarceration, violence and death.

Ive been advocating the abolition of the police for years. Regardless of your view on police power whether you want to get rid of the police or simply to make them less violent heres an immediate demand we can all make: Cut the number of police in half and cut their budget in half. Fewer police officers equals fewer opportunities for them to brutalize and kill people. The idea is gaining traction in Minneapolis, Dallas, Los Angeles and other cities.

History is instructive, not because it offers us a blueprint for how to act in the present but because it can help us ask better questions for the future.

The Lexow Committee undertook the first major investigation into police misconduct in New York City in 1894. At the time, the most common complaint against the police was about clubbing the routine bludgeoning of citizens by patrolmen armed with nightsticks or blackjacks, as the historian Marilynn Johnson has written.

The Wickersham Commission, convened to study the criminal justice system and examine the problem of Prohibition enforcement, offered a scathing indictment in 1931, including evidence of brutal interrogation strategies. It put the blame on a lack of professionalism among the police.

After the 1967 urban uprisings, the Kerner Commission found that police actions were final incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders. Its report listed a now-familiar set of recommendations, like working to build community support for law enforcement and reviewing police operations in the ghetto, to ensure proper conduct by police officers.

These commissions didnt stop the violence; they just served as a kind of counterinsurgent function each time police violence led to protests. Calls for similar reforms were trotted out in response to the brutal police beating of Rodney King in 1991 and the rebellion that followed, and again after the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The final report of the Obama administrations Presidents Task Force on 21st Century Policing resulted in procedural tweaks like implicit-bias training, police-community listening sessions, slight alterations of use-of-force policies and systems to identify potentially problematic officers early on.

But even a member of the task force, Tracey Meares, noted in 2017, policing as we know it must be abolished before it can be transformed.

The philosophy undergirding these reforms is that more rules will mean less violence. But police officers break rules all the time. Look what has happened over the past few weeks police officers slashing tires, shoving old men on camera, and arresting and injuring journalists and protesters. These officers are not worried about repercussions any more than Daniel Pantaleo, the former New York City police officer whose chokehold led to Eric Garners death; he waved to a camera filming the incident. He knew that the police union would back him up and he was right. He stayed on the job for five more years.

Minneapolis had instituted many of these best practices but failed to remove Derek Chauvin from the force despite 17 misconduct complaints over nearly two decades, culminating in the entire world watching as he knelt on George Floyds neck for almost nine minutes.

Why on earth would we think the same reforms would work now? We need to change our demands. The surest way of reducing police violence is to reduce the power of the police, by cutting budgets and the number of officers.

But dont get me wrong. We are not abandoning our communities to violence. We dont want to just close police departments. We want to make them obsolete.

We should redirect the billions that now go to police departments toward providing health care, housing, education and good jobs. If we did this, there would be less need for the police in the first place.

We can build other ways of responding to harms in our society. Trained community care workers could do mental-health checks if someone needs help. Towns could use restorative-justice models instead of throwing people in prison.

What about rape? The current approach hasnt ended it. In fact most rapists never see the inside of a courtroom. Two-thirds of people who experience sexual violence never report it to anyone. Those who file police reports are often dissatisfied with the response. Additionally, police officers themselves commit sexual assault alarmingly often. A study in 2010 found that sexual misconduct was the second most frequently reported form of police misconduct. In 2015, The Buffalo News found that an officer was caught for sexual misconduct every five days.

When people, especially white people, consider a world without the police, they envision a society as violent as our current one, merely without law enforcement and they shudder. As a society, we have been so indoctrinated with the idea that we solve problems by policing and caging people that many cannot imagine anything other than prisons and the police as solutions to violence and harm.

People like me who want to abolish prisons and police, however, have a vision of a different society, built on cooperation instead of individualism, on mutual aid instead of self-preservation. What would the country look like if it had billions of extra dollars to spend on housing, food and education for all? This change in society wouldnt happen immediately, but the protests show that many people are ready to embrace a different vision of safety and justice.

When the streets calm and people suggest once again that we hire more black police officers or create more civilian review boards, I hope that we remember all the times those efforts have failed.

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Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police - The New York Times

In recent weeks, some protesters of police violence have called for defunding law enforcement agencies. Critics have seized on those calls as evidence of a radical agenda in seeking to discredit the protests.

Some advocates support the total abolition of police departments. Others say they are not talking about getting rid of police altogether, but handing some of their responsibilities to professionals better equipped to respond to the root problems. They say police have been asked to address an array of societal problems from drug abuse to mental illness and marital strife that have been criminalized rather than treated, and that the money spent on policing would be better spent elsewhere.

Heres a primer on the discussion.

What is defunding? What is abolition?

Defunding the police means cutting the budgets of local law enforcement agencies and instead investing the money in community programs, accessible housing and public health (including mental health care), among other social needs. One leading abolitionist campaign, 8toAbolition, says that defunding isnt the only step toward abolition: It also advocates for reducing police union power and requiring police agencies rather than cities or counties to cover costs in misconduct lawsuit settlements.

Those in favor of abolition want a world with no police at all. Most see it as a goal to be achieved over time that includes closing jails and prisons and decriminalizing misdemeanors. Not everyone who calls for police budget cuts supports abolition, but abolitionists see defunding as a crucial step toward their end goal.

Are these new ideas? Where do they come from?

For decades, activists have discussed abolishing prisons. The idea of police abolition grew out of the same movement, which can be traced to the early 1970s.

The abolition movement has been led largely by two black women, Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

A pillar of the abolitionist argument is that American law enforcement is built on a structure so rotten it cant be repaired. In his book The End of Policing, author Alex S. Vitale traces the origins of American police forces to the protection of the rich and powerful: In northern cities, police were established to suppress immigrants and the working class; in the south, police forces grew out of slave patrols. The latter, especially, is a favored talking point of abolitionists.

How is it different from reform?

Reformists believe in systemically changing police agencies through training (such as implicit bias training, which aims to teach people to recognize and correct for their unconscious prejudices), policies (such as giving officers the duty to intervene if they see a colleague using excessive force, banning chokeholds and requiring attempts at de-escalation) and technology (such as body-worn cameras). Among the most well-known reformist campaigns is the 8CantWait campaign, which has been namechecked by government officials and law enforcement leaders in Tampa Bay. Reformists dont believe in abolishing police agencies, and they sometimes advocate for those agencies to get more funding to implement reforms.

Practically, how would abolition work?

Over time, abolitionists say, cities and counties would cut the budgets of police departments and sheriffs offices and reallocate that money. They could expand housing assistance, hire more well-paid social workers and mental health professionals, boost public transit, give economic and environmental support to neighborhoods that have been left to struggle. Abolitionists argue that those measures will prevent or drastically reduce many of the incidents police respond to, such as theft and other property crime, and conflicts stemming from mental illness or substance abuse.

Abolitionists dont believe that a world without police would also be free of conflict. But they believe that in most cases, other professionals are more well-equipped to resolving those situations than police are. In the abolitionist vision, crisis intervention specialists would be dispatched to domestic incidents and mental health emergencies, and social workers rather than police would take the lead on helping homeless people.

But what about murder, rape and other violent crime?

The Minneapolis-based abolitionist organization MPD150, in its primer on police abolition, acknowledges that we may need a small, specialized class of public servants whose job is to respond to violent crimes. Advocates for defunding and abolishing police also point out that only a very small amount of police work involves violent crime, that most crimes go unreported and that of those reported, most remain unsolved.

They also believe that the alternative first responders social workers, mental health experts, crisis intervention specialists would be better suited than police to handle many incidents that ultimately result in violent crime.

Have other places done this before? How did it go?

Theres no apparent modern analogy for abolition or near-total defunding of an American police department. The closest anywhere has come is probably Camden, N.J., which disbanded its police department and built a countywide police agency from the bottom up. The police force there was considered too corrupt to reform, and the new agency focused on reducing violent crime and strengthening connections within the community.

Camden has been seen as a success story, in part because its violent crime rate did plunge after the new agency was formed. It also has critics, who say that many officers still live outside the city and dont reflect its demographics most residents are black or Hispanic and who point out that excessive force complaints went up after the new agency was established.

Is there a proposal out there for how abolition or defunding would work?

Yes. Perhaps the most thorough is the 8ToAbolition campaign, which lays out several distinct steps. Other resources include MPD150 and an organization called A World Without Police.

HOW TO SUPPORT: Whether youre protesting or staying inside, here are ways to educate yourself and support black-owned businesses.

WHAT PROTESTERS WANT: Protesters explain what changes would make them feel like the movement is successful.

WHAT ARE NON-LETHAL AND LESS-LETHAL WEAPONS? A guide to whats used in local and national protests.

WHAT ARE ARRESTED PROTESTERS CHARGED WITH? About half the charges filed have included unlawful assembly.

CAN YOU BE FIRED FOR PROTESTING? In Florida, you can. Learn more.

HEADING TO A PROTEST? How to protect eyes from teargas, pepper spray and rubber bullets.

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What does it mean to defund the police? - Tampa Bay Times

Erik McGregor/LightRocket via Getty ImagesA protest in Brooklyn, New York, June 2, 2020

In Columbus, Ohio, where I livejust as in towns and cities across the countrythe streets have been alive with rallies and marches, sit-ins and die-ins, community events and emerging mutual aid networks, in solidarity with George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, three black people among many killed by police this spring. And as has also been the case in cities and towns across the country, the police response has been brutal and repressive. Handmade cardboard signs and spray paint now decorate public spaces with the new demands of mass protest: Defund the Police, Fuck 12, ACAB, and Abolish the Police. From coast to coast, the target of these protests is the very institution of policing, rather than a few bad apples. The demands reflect growing recognition that the problem is not individual police or isolated bad acts, and that reforms like body cameras and civilian review boards simply will not lead to the profound change that many know is necessary. The protesters are saying, loud and clear, that the only solution to the violence of policing is less policingor maybe, none at all.

The call to defund police has rapidly developed momentum, with mayors across the US considering budget cuts to their police departments, and Minneapolis City Council committing to full dissolution. These calls to defund and disband police have roots in decades of prison abolitionist organizing, which aims to end incarceration and policing in favor of a society grounded in collective care and social provision. In fact, from Minneapolis to Los Angeles to New York City, where local officials are most quickly announcing the most concrete changes, abolitionist organizing has been growing since the 2014 Ferguson and 2015 Baltimore rebellions. Minneapolis, for example, is not simply the place where the uprisings began after the murder of George Floyd last monthit is also home to the Black Visions Collective and Reclaim the Block, both of which have been working to defund the police since 2017.

Until fairly recently, the most common demand at protests responding to police killings had been the call for the criminal prosecution of individual police officers. But as happened in the case of Darren Wilson, the Ferguson police officer who killed Michael Brown, most police are never charged for their violence. When they are, police unions provide officers paid counsel. Judges dismiss cases and juries acquit. In the rare case of a charge and a conviction, judges typically impose sentences less severe than is commonplace for far less serious crimes.

Since the emergence of Black Lives Matter (BLM), and long before, we have watched this police impunity play out time and time again. Many non-black people have had to grapple with the reality that policing is different for different people and in different communities: whereas police tend to treat middle class and wealthy white people with respect, they often treat black, brown, queer, trans, and poor people with violence and disregard. Meanwhile, cities have spent hundreds of millions of dollars on body-camera programs; but police often turn these cameras off, and there is no clear evidence that they reduce police violence even when used properly. And as journalists scrambled to document the rates at which police kill every daydata that, before 2014, was not publicly available and that the federal government still does not collectwe learned that police kill almost three people every day. That rate of killing has not let up.

Although calls for defunding and dissolution, rather than reform, may feel new to many, abolitionist organizing against the prison industrial complexwhich includes prisons, police, and surveillancegoes back more than two decades. The organization Critical Resistance, established in the late 1990s in Berkeley, California, and now with chapters in Oakland, New York, Los Angeles, and Portland, is central to both the organizing work and the dissemination of ideas on which todays campaigns draw. Critical Resistance places its efforts in the history of struggles against enslavement, and identifies slave patrols as the progenitor of US policing. Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Rose Braz, and Rachel Herzing are among the groups co-founders. Daviss Are Prisons Obsolete?, Gilmores Golden Gulag, and Critical Resistances various handbooks, workshops, and campaigns for prison and police abolitionincluding against jail expansion and police enforcement of gang injunctionshave become blueprints for organizers across the country.

As organizers were witnessing the failures of reform to produce meaningful change within the criminal legal system, abolitionist experiments across the country made progress. In 2015, a campaign for reparations by Project NIA, We Charge Genocide, the Peoples Law Office, and others won redress for black people subject to the Chicago Police Departments decades-long torture program under police commander Jon Burge. The reparations ordinance, adopted by Chicagos City Council, includes free junior college tuition and counseling for survivors and their families, and changes to the public school curriculum to reflect the history of police violence. Mariame Kaba, the founder of Project NIA, explained that the reparations ordinance created an expansive potential vision of what justice could look like when people are harmed. It disavowed criminal prosecution as a means of gaining redress, and offered an alternate way of providing some measure of justice. It inspired new ways of thinking about campaigns for change.

In August 2016, months before Trumps election, the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), a coalition of more than fifty black-led racial justice organizations, released a policy platform endorsed by hundreds more racial justice organizations. The Vision for Black Lives marked a shift within the BLM ecosystem toward an abolitionist stance, framing prisons and police as central to the countrys history of anti-blackness, rooted in the structures of enslavement. While the Vision does not call for outright abolition of prisons and police, its demands aim to shrink the carceral state and deny its legitimacy as a purported guarantor of public safety. The Visions call for investment in the education, health, and safety of black people alongside divestment from prisons, police, and the criminal legal system, demonstrated the growing influence of abolitionist frameworks on racial justice movements.

The Vision soon inspired invest-divest campaigns across the country, which, in turn, led to a widespread understanding of the disproportionate share of municipal budgets allocated to police departments. In 2017, the Center for Popular Democracy, Law for Black Lives, and BYP100 released a joint report that analyzed local budgets across the country: it found that Oakland spent an astonishing 41.2 percent of its general fund expenditures on the police department, followed by Chicago at 38.6 percent, Minneapolis at 35.8 percent, and Houston at 35 percent. Echoing Ruth Wilson Gilmores analysis that policing and prisons have become catch-all responses to social problems like homelessness and unemployment, the report noted that elected officials had over the preceding three decades stripped funds from mental health services, housing subsidies, youth programs, and food benefits programs, while pouring money into police forces, military grade weapons, high-tech surveillance, jails, and prisons.

By the beginning of 2020, a growing number of abolitionist and abolitionist-inspired campaigns had taken hold. The National Bail Out collective organized annual Mamas Day Bailouts to obtain the release from jail of black mothers who cannot afford bail. Detention Watch Networks #CommunitiesNotCages worked to close immigrant detention centers and stop the construction of new ones. Coalitions against jail expansions and new jails existed in New York City, the Bay Area, Detroit, Atlanta, St. Louis, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Chicagos #NoCopAcademy organized against the creation of a second police training facility projected to cost $95 million, while Durham Beyond Policing opposed a $71 million plan for a new police headquarters in North Carolina, calling instead for a community-led safety and wellness task force. Campaigns to oust police from schools and invest instead in counselors and other support services proliferated under the banner #CounselorsNotCops. In Oakland, the Anti-Policing Healthworkers Cohort organized community-based alternatives to calling the police for health-care emergencies. These efforts aim to end the primacy of the criminal legal system, to shift resources into social services, to provide a social wage, and to empower black, brown, poor, working-class, immigrant, and LGBTQ communities.

Many of these campaigns have seen concrete wins and, by shifting the larger public discussion around police and prisons, theyve redefined the debate. In the realm of incarceration, the discussion has moved from strategies for decarceration to the possibility of abolition. In the realm of policing, the conversation has shifted from reforms requiring additional investmentbody cameras, new trainingsto the possibility of divestment. And it is the abolitionist framing of the fundamental violence of the criminal system that has so thoroughly undermined the moral ground of prosecutors, leading some (like Larry Krasner in Philly or Rachael Rollins in Boston) to claim the mantle of progressive prosecutor. Abolition has also gained wider political currency within the broader left, with the resurgent Democratic Socialists of America creating a Police and Prison Abolition Working Group at their 2019 convention.

This organizing work took on new significance with the Covid-19 pandemic. The failure of elected leaders to respond adequately to the public health crisis intensified concerns about how we care for ourselves and for one another. Mutual aid networks grew in their capacity to provide the resources and solidarity needed in the absence of government support. These initiatives have called into question why food, housing, and health care are commodities rather than entitlements. They also made visible the disproportionate impact of the disease on black and brown people and the poor.

Since February, in the face of soaring unemployment and rates of infection, campaigns to cancel rent, provide public health care, and release people from jails, prisons, and detention centers proliferated. #FreeThemAll campaigns have articulated the dangers of human caging amid Covid-19 and brought attention to the health crisis created by prisons and jails even before the pandemic. The police response to protests, including brutality, armored vehicles, curfew, tear gas, pepper spray, rubber and wooden bullets, brought attention to glaring contradictions in funding and priorities: between countless police officers equipped with high-tech gear and insufficient numbers of health-care workers, shortages of essential personal protective equipment, and exorbitant health-care costs, forcing millions into crippling debt; between the governments immediate deployment of police to respond to protests, and its failure to respond to the pandemic with mass testing and distribution of funds.

Across the country, police budgets are astronomical and police union power is enormous. Consider Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcettis recent announcement that he hopes to take $250 million from the LAPDs $1.8 billion budget to put into youth jobs, health initiatives, and peace centersafter years-long organizing by the group LA for Youth, which has called on the city to reallocate a percentage of its police budget to a Department of Youth Development. Even with that cut, the LAPD budget would, by Garcettis own account, still swallow just under half of the citys general expenditures. In other words, a $250 million cut represents a tiny fraction of a bloated police budget.

Despite the successes of abolitionist organizing in magnifying these issues of scale, power, and safety, the road ahead is long. I recently asked Herzing, now the executive director for the Center for Political Education, and Kaba for their views on defund as the demand of the current uprising. Both expressed tremendous hopeand considerable trepidation. Herzing told me she worries that if defund is put forward as an end-game demand, well wind up with a series of cities that skim a half a percent off their cop budgets and well have given up the opportunity to make the deep transformations that I think are potentially embedded in the demand. Defund is one strategy among many other strategies, Kaba explained. We also want to drastically decrease and diminish and abolish the legitimacy of the police.

Abolitionists are often caricatured as having unattainable ends and an impractical agenda. But many organizations, like Survived and Punished and generationFIVE, have demonstrated the failure of our system even on its own terms, and others, like Critical Resistance, have offered clear rubrics for how an abolitionist commitment reorients campaigns for change. There is no delusion among abolitionists that we will ever live in a world without conflict or interpersonal violence. Right now our go-to response to all manner of social, political, and economic conflictwhether it is homelessness, domestic violence, migrationis prisons and police. The abolitionist invitation is to investigate these problems with care and particularity, and collectively craft responses that do not rely on violence and punishment. In an abolitionist future, Kaba insisted, we would continu[e] to struggle over violence, but we would have different social relationships and skills and what we need to make better decisions and take care of each other in better ways.

The demands to defund and dismantle reflect a growing consensus about the failures of neoliberalism, the contradictions of capitalism, and the violence of white supremacy. While it is unclear whether all those carrying placards emblazoned with todays slogans fully grasp the transformative project of abolition, these mass protests point to a growing understanding that the problem is not police training or inadequate technology. The problem is the institution of policing itself: its power, its origins in enslavement and indigenous dispossession, and its hold on how we conceive of public safety.

The struggle for abolition belongs to a broader push to rewrite the social contract, including efforts to cancel student debt, tax the wealthy, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and the Red Deal. Over the years, I have heard organizers rally around not one more dollar or starve the beast. Now, more and more, you hear care, not cops. That new slogan embodies the abolitionist horizon, not simply to dismantle prisons and policing, but to build alternate forms of community care and collective provision for all.

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How Defund and Disband Became the Demands | by Amna A. Akbar - The New York Review of Books

Opinion

DigitalVisionVectors

ByBettina L. Love

This essay is not to enumerate the recent murders of Black people by police, justify why protest and uprising are important for social change, or remind us why NFL player Colin Kaepernick took a knee. If you have missed those points, blamed victims, or proclaimed All Lives Matter, this article is not for you, and you may want to ask yourself whether you should be teaching any children, especially Black children.

This article is for teachers who understand that racism is real, anti-Blackness is real, and state-sanctioned violence, which allows police to kill Black people with impunity, is real. It is for teachers who know change is necessary and want to understand exactly what kind of change we need as a country.

Politicians who know the words justice and equity only when they want peace in the streets are going to try to persuade us that they are capable of reforming centuries of oppression by changing policies, adding more accountability measures, and removing the bad apples from among police.

These actions will sound comprehensive and, with time, a solution to injustice. These reforms may even reduce police killings or school suspensions of Black students, but as civil rights activist Ella Baker said, a reduction of injustice is not the same as freedom. Reformists want incremental change, but Black lives are being lost with every day we wait. And to be Black is to live in a constant state of exhaustion.

Centuries of Black resistance and protest have had a profound impact on the nation. As Nikole Hannah-Jones, the creator of The 1619 Project, points out, We have helped the country to live up to its founding ideals. ... Without the idealistic, strenuous, and patriotic efforts of Black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very differentit might not be a democracy at all. Those civil rights achievements were critical, including the reformist ones.

But reform is no longer enough. Too often, reform is rooted in Whiteness because it appeases White liberals who need to see change but want to maintain their status, power, and supremacy.

Abolition of oppression is needed because reform still did not stop a police officer from putting his knee on George Floyds neck in broad daylight for 8 minutes and 46 seconds; it did not stop police from killing Breonna Taylor in her own home. Also that: Largely non-White school districts get $23 billion less in state and local funding than predominantly White ones; Black people make up 13 percent of the U.S. population but account for 26 percent of the deaths from COVID-19; and with only 5 percent of the worlds population, the United States has nearly 25 percent of the worlds prison population. We need to be honest: We cannot reform something this monstrous; we have to abolish it.

Abolitionists want to eliminate what is oppressive, not reform it, not reimagine it, but remove oppression by its roots. Abolitionists want to understand the conditions that normalize oppression and uproot those conditions, too. Abolitionists, in the words of scholar and activist Bill Ayers, demand the impossible and work to build a world rooted in the possibilities of justice. Abolitionists are not anarchists because, as we eliminate these systems, we want to build conditions that create institutions that are just, loving, equitable, and center Black lives.

Abolitionism is not a social-justice trend. It is a way of life defined by commitment to working toward a humanity where no one is disposable, prisons no longer exist, being Black is not a crime, teachers have high expectations for Black and Brown children, and joy is seen as a foundation of learning.

Abolitionists strive for that reality by fighting for a divestment of law enforcement to redistribute funds to education, housing, jobs, and health care; elimination of high-stakes testing; replacement of watered-down and Eurocentric materials from educational publishers like Pearson, McGraw Hill, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt with community-created standards and curriculum; the end of police presence in schools; employment of Black teachers en masse; hiring of therapists and counselors who believe Black lives matter in schools; destruction of inner-city schools that resemble prisons; and elimination of suspension in favor of restorative justice.

Abolitionist work is hard and demands an indomitable spirit of resistance. As a nation, we saw this spirit in Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. We also see it in 21st-century abolitionists like Angela Davis, Charlene Carruthers, Erica Meiners, Derecka Purnell, David Stovall, and Farima Pour-Khorshid.

For non-Black people, abolitionism requires giving up the idea of being an ally to become a co-conspirator. Many social-justice groups have shifted the language to co-conspirator because allies work toward something that is mutually beneficial and supportive to all parties. Co-conspirators, in contrast, understand how Whiteness and privilege work in our society and leverage their power, privilege, and resources in solidarity with justice movements to dismantle White supremacy. Co-conspirators function as verbs, not as nouns.

The journey for abolitionists and our co-conspirators is arduous, but we fight for a future that will never need to be reformed again because it was built as just from the beginning.

In 2016, Bettina L. Love, the author of this essay, spoke to Education Week about African-American girls and discipline. Heres what she had to say:

Bettina L. Love is a professor of educational theory and practice at the University of Georgia. She is writing a series of essays about race in America for Education Week.

Vol. 39, Issue 36, Page 24

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An Essay for Teachers Who Understand Racism Is Real - Education Week

For more anti-racism resources, check out our guide,Racial Justice Is Reproductive Justice.

If you consume any form of U.S. media, pro-police propaganda is inevitable. From the 24-hour marathons of cop shows on television, to the growing popularity of true crime podcasts, people seem to be obsessed with the idea that the police keep us safe.

This belief is why instances of police violence can feel so shocking to people who dont live in fear of the cops daily. Recognizing the harm that police inflict on society dailythrough rampant sexual misconduct, racist practices of surveillance, and police brutality and killingsabolitionists like myself have been yelling that we need to abolish police. At this moment, it feels like more people than ever before are listening.

What does it mean to abolish the police?

As with calls to defund the police, the movement to abolish police is just another step in our long-game goal of dismantling the entire prison industrial complex. While some supporters of prison reform may want to defund only to start over with a more diverse and better-trained version, abolitionists are organizing for a world without policing.

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Police officers are just one deadly part of a system that takes away peoples agency and safety under the guise of providing accountability. As abolitionists, we work toward accountability with ourselves and our community every day. We believe in peoples ability to rectify harm, in an environment that recognizes that the society that we live in often facilitates and creates the conditions for harm to occur. We also push back on the idea of legality, recognizing that just because something is illegal does not make it inherently unethical, and instead realize that the framework for criminality in the United States is steeped in anti-Blackness.

Who will we call instead?

Our community. The abolition of policing will require us to transform our relationships with each other and build community with people we previously felt disconnected from. This requires vulnerability and honesty, and also being intentional about identifying who we can call before harm happens. Working with our neighbors to make sure we keep each other safe, finding solidarity with our broader community through mutual aid projects, and learning about and appreciating each others cultures are just some of the ways we can work to create a police-free world.

We are fighting for community-based restorative justice so people can heal the hurt that has taken place between them interpersonally. We are also working to radically shift the conditions that harm occurs through transformative justice as well.

What about the murderers?

One of the things the prison industrial complex (and military industrial complex) does is it redefines who gets to be deemed human. This means that people are able to reason away the deaths of incarcerated people, victims of police violence, and victims of the U.S. imperialismbut are against prison abolition because of murderers.

Abolitionists believe in accountability, and as a central part of accountability, we also believe in peoples ability to change. Through transformative justice, we hope to build a world where instances of physical violence decrease because peoples basic needs are met, and they are able to spend time pouring into their community and using skills theyve learned to manage conflict.

What about sexual harm?

While this is commonly used as a gotcha point against abolitionists, people have long theorized what a world without police will look like with respect to physical violence and sexual harm. Much of the work to address sexual harm is in fact led by survivors like myself, who do not want to see carceral feminism (the belief that harsher prison sentences will help solve gendered or sexual violence) gain traction under the guise of protecting us from harm.

Groups like INCITE!a network of feminists of color who organize to end state, community, and domestic violence, are notable for creating toolkits around these issues. Survived and Punished, my political home, comprises of people who are working to broaden our analysis around how sexual violence intertwines with the prison industrial complex. As organizers, we raise awareness about the fact that people who are survivors of sexual harm are often criminalized and incarcerated because of the same laws that are supposedly in place to protect them. Black women, trans people, immigrants, and people with disabilities fear going to the police because they know that doing so will open them up to more potential harm.

An uncomfortable fact for most people to grapple with is that there is no way to end sexual violence without ending the carceral state and abolishing the jobs of those who work within itespecially police officers. Many police officers have been caught using their power to coerce and threaten people into sex through undercover stings to arrest and endanger sex workers. They also are responsible for violence within their homes. People who are in prison are sexually assaulted daily through strip searches, violations of privacy, medical trauma, and a lack of access to menstrual products.

Black women, trans people, immigrants, and people with disabilities fear going to the police because they know that doing so will open them up to more potential harm.

This is also not a secret. Because of anti-Blackness and the pro-cop propaganda we are fed daily, when someone we dislike is sent to prison, many people allude to the fact that people within prisons will be assaulted with comments like dont drop the soap. Not only does this further the idea that sexual assault is a punishment for people who are bad, it shows that people are not as actively committed to stopping sexual violence as they think they are.

We dont stop sexual violence and murder through sentencing people to a system where there is more violence created, and we arent helping anyone when we pretend that abusive people are just scary characters lurking in the dark. We end sexual violence by getting to its roots and understanding that we have a culture that fosters sexual harm. We can work to fight against this culture by understanding that most people experience violence from people they know personally, and they also do not end up reporting.

Through restorative justice, groups like Bay Area Transformative Justice Collective and Ahimsa Collective are working to handle sexual harm within the community without calling the cops. Books like Beyond Survival and The Revolution Starts at Home propose alternatives to handling sexual harm within communities. Everyday people are working for ways to foster accountability without relying on the cops, and we need as much creativity as possible.

How realistic is this?

As activist and scholar Angela Davis and others have pointed out, abolitionists working to end chattel slavery in the United States in the 19th century had no reason to believe that slavery would ever end. However, through working together and creating tools within their community, they were able to make the impossible possible.

Abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, abolition is not absence, it is presence. The presence I envision when organizing is not the presence of fear around police violence, it is the presence of my friends, loved ones, and comrades working to build a better world where none of us are disposable.

Read more from the original source:

What We Mean When We Say Abolish the Police - Rewire.News

GLASGOW, Scotland In Scotland, a history of slave trading hides in plain sight. Its in the striking Georgian facades of Edinburgh and Glasgow, paid for by plantation profits, and on the monuments and street names that venerate men who were enriched by human suffering.

Generations of Scots have walked down Glassford Street and Ingram Street in Glasgow, for example, perhaps without realizing that the names honor two of the city's most prosperous plantation owners, John Glassford and Archibald Ingram.

For a growing number of Scots, this must change.

Almost 25,000 people have signed a petition calling on Glasgow to rename streets linked to slave owners.

Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, has seen similar activism, with a focus on monuments commemorating the trades beneficiaries, such as one that pays tribute to Henry Dundas, a politician who delayed the abolition of slavery in the British Empire by 15 years.

Emboldened by the explosion of protests in America following the death of George Floyd in police custody, there are renewed calls for Scotland to confront its slave-owning past and in doing so, fight the scourge of modern-day racism.

Ivan McKee, Scotlands trade minister, has called for greater discussion around the countrys slave heritage. Theres a lot of people who dont know much about it, and this is an opportunity to raise awareness, he told NBC News.

Scotlands pivotal role in transatlantic slavery has at times been discussed less than that of England and the United States. But from running slave forts on the West African coast, captaining ships ladened with human cargo, and owning cotton, tobacco, coffee and sugar plantations in the West Indies, Scots played a key role at every level of the industry.

Sales of these sought-after goods fired Scotlands industrial revolution and brought immeasurable wealth to the nations merchants. The combined annual value of trade between Scotland and the West Indies and Scotland in 1790 was equivalent to at least 50 million pounds ($46 million) in todays valuations, according to the National Trust for Scotland.

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And when, in 1833, Britain abolished slavery, millions of pounds were paid into Scottish pockets to compensate for financial losses.

This money trickled down through Scottish society, bringing prosperity to places such as Glasgows Merchant City and Edinburghs New Town, areas that owe their architectural grandeur to the proceeds of slavery.

But not all agree that street names should be amended and statues toppled, as they have in Bristol and London in the past week.

If you remove the evidence, you remove the deed," Sir Geoff Palmer, professor emeritus at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, told NBC News in a phone interview. "If were going to talk about honest history by removing them, youre altering history."

Palmer said emphasis must instead be put on education and a shakeup of the Scottish school curriculum to better reflect the country's slave history. He has campaigned for explanatory plaques to be installed at slavery-linked monuments, also.

The past has consequences. Racism is a consequence of the past. Therefore we have to deal with those consequences, he said.

For some, the arts can play an important role in reckoning with the past. "Enough of Him," a new play from Edinburgh-born writer May Sumbwanyambe, looks to address the dearth of dramatic work on Scotlands colonial history. It tells the remarkable story of Joseph Knight, a slave who successfully sued his master, establishing the principle that slavery could not be upheld in Scotland.

Putting on plays like this that allow audiences in Scotland and beyond Scotland to go: Black people have been part of this country and shaping the culture and social development of this country for a very, very long time,' Sumbwanyambe said.

If we dont know that Black people have lived side-by-side with white people for hundreds of years, as opposed to just 70 years, its easier for racism to foment.

Last year, Glasgow University became the first academic institution in the U.K. to commit to slavery reparations, acknowledging that it had been the recipient of slave-linked funds. Over the next two decades, the school plans to raise 20 million pounds ($25 million) in partnership with the University of the West Indies, to confront the debilitating legacies of slavery and colonization through research and policy development.

At the local government level, the Glasgow City Council is currently investigating the citys ties to transatlantic slavery and has committed to holding a public consultation on how to respond to its findings. Similar discussions are taking place in Edinburgh.

As for reparations on a national level however, there is little progress. For decades, Caribbean nations including Jamaica, where one-third of slave plantations were Scots-owned have called for formal financial reparations, but to no avail.

For Eunice Olumide, a Scottish author, art curator and activist, this is unacceptable.

The only conversation we need to have is how reparations are given, she said.

Its really important for Western people and white people to understand that thats a discussion that needs to be had with leaders in the Afro-Caribbean community before they take action.

More needs to be done in Scotland, too, Olumide believes, to recognize the contributions of Black Scots in the public sphere.

Its long overdue that Black creators in this country are enshrined in history and commemorated. Because its quite obvious that theres a serious lack of understanding of the contribution of people of color to the United Kingdom and to Scotland.

See more here:

Calls grow for Scotland to reckon with its slave-owning past - NBC News

State violence has no opposition party. Communities that want to dismantle police departments will need the power to do that work themselves.

The clashes between police and protesters in response to the recent police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Tony McDade, and others throughout the country expose the violence inherent to the U.S. system of policing. Social media has been inundated with hundreds of videos chronicling police aggression and brutality. Cities nationwide, particularly in the nations capital of Washington, D.C., have faced unprecedented militarization of their streets. Police have wielded weapons typically used only by special forces in overseas military campaigns, even going as far as to use a Lakota helicopter with Red Cross markings in a show of force against protesters (in violation of the Geneva Convention).

A number of attempts to give political expression to the energy in the streets have emerged in recent days. Some have emphasized the symbolic. Not a month after proposing a budget to increase the local police budget by some $45 million, Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser commissioned artists to paint Black Lives Matter on the streets near the White House where clashes between protesters and armed state security still continue, prompting immediate and sharp rebuke from Black Lives Matter DC. Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden cobbled together legislation calling for reforms that include creating a national database of civilian complaints against police and banning chokeholds and no-knock raidsa tepid defense of the status quo wrapped in kente cloth.

Others have emphasized surgical reforms. Campaign Zeros 8 Cant Wait lists eight potential reforms to laws and rules regulating police conduct. These run the gamut from banning specific uses of force (including chokeholds and strangleholds) to requiring warning before shooting.

But more radical proposals are also circulating, particularly on social media. Many now demand that we defund police departments. This is a particularly pressing project in Los Angeles, where the LAPD leviathan consumes some 53 percent of the citys discretionary funds. The activists of the Peoples Budget, a coalition convened by Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, have responded by advocating a budget with a completely revamped schedule of spending priorities that would shrink the LAPD budget to a paltry 5.7 percent of unrestricted revenues.

Another radical call is under consideration: abolishing the police. Police and prison abolitionists imagine a different way of responding to harm and maintaining entirely, including a direct answer to #8CantWait in #8ToAbolition. In their vision of the world, police and prisons are active impediments to justice and safety. #8CantWait focuses on regulating police activityfor instance, one provision requires fellow officers to intervene if they believe an officer is using excessive force, in order to puncture the blue wall of silence that shields violent officers from accountability. #8toAbolition takes a wider view, including investing in care (like food banks and child care) and housing, taking aim at the social insecurity that abolitionists take to be the fundamental sources of social harm.

Fulfilling the demands of either of these campaigns would surely improve our political situation to some degree. But there is another approach to considerone not yet a prominent part of the national conversationthat was built into the Movement for Black Lives policy platform. It has the support of the Twin City Coalition for Justice for Jamar, a coalition of Minneapolis activists formed in the 2015 uprising after the police murdered Jamar Clark. It has been explained at length and in detail by co-authors M Adams, a Black, queer, and gender-nonconforming community organizer and movement scientist based in Madison, Wisconsin, and Max Rameau, a Haitian-born Pan-African theorist, campaign strategist, organizer, and author. I believe Adams and Rameau are right, and that the most promising path forwardon the way to a fuller reorganization of society around human needs instead of profit and dominationis community control over the police.

The U.S. system of policing evolved to maintain exploitative economic systems and maintain oppressive social hierarchies. In the South, the organizational predecessor to modern police departments were the slave patrols; the private property of interest were the enslaved Africans themselves, and slave patrols hunted fugitives and used campaigns of terror to deter fleeing and other forms of resistance. In the North, the primary spurs for police department development were union busting and strike breaking. The end of the nineteenth century saw an incredible amount of labor militancy: in the period from 1880 to 1900, New York City alone had over 5,000 strikes and Chicago almost 2,000. Police departments were tasked with surveillance of immigrants and newly freed Black Americans, and businessmen were given keys to special alarm boxes that would alert the police at the first sight of visible worker unrest. In both the South and North, the purpose of the police department was fundamentally the same: to secure, within the settled frontier, the social order on which elites profit-making activities and social prestige depended.

Today, the colonial system that subsequently militarized the police and set incarceration running at warp speed is maintained by a dizzying array of wildly perverse incentives, meticulously mapped by co-authors Chris Surprenant and Jason Brennan in Injustice for All. Policing and incarceration are big business, shaped by the direct influence and lobbying activity of corporations and investment groups for which there is not even the pretense of public accountability. This business is aided and abetted by the formal political system: police militarization and mass incarceration policies are managed across red, blue, and purple states by actors from both parties at all levels of government. State violence has no opposition party.

Thus, communities will have to dismantle the prison-industrial complex themselvesbrick by brick. The financial and political relationships that sustain it are much larger than police departments themselves, much less their budgets. To make headway, we have to pick our spots, and insert community power in between police departments and the wider, tangled mess that fuels their operation.

Defunding police, by itself, will make the problem smaller. This is, in a sense, progress. But it leaves the basic political structure intact: it does not necessarily change how police evaluate themselves, which means that they will continue to target the people that their human or algorithmic supervisors identify as fair game. It will not change the revenue structure of the cities that fund themselves with fines and forfeiture; police will still get directives from on high to engage in piracy, incentivizing interactions that prove tragic for the plundered.

The core problem with policing and incarceration is the same problem that plagues our whole political system: elite capture. The laws, the regulations, the bailouts, and the wonks who write and evaluate all of the above are all powerfully influencedif not functionally controlledby elite political and corporate interests. We cannot put our faith in elected representatives and merely vote our way out of this problem: elections are more dominated by dollars than ever, and grassroots energy around political figures is increasingly shaped by identity politics, which faces its own elite capture problem.

Instead, we need to give power back to the peopledirectly. Under one specific proposal, offered by the Washington, D.C.area group Pan-African Community Action (of which Im a member), communities would be divided into districts, each of which would be empowered to self-determine how to maintain public order. Each district would hold a plebiscite to decide what to do with its current police department, immediately giving the community the direct voting power to abolish, restructure, downsize, or otherwise reconstruct their departments.

Whichever police departments survive the vote would be directly controllednot overseen, not solicited for advice, not merely participating in decision-makingby a pair of civilian control boards. To prevent the corporate capture of elections through lobbying and advertising that plagues the rest of our political system, these boards would be staffed by sortition (random selection of the population, in the way juries are composed) rather than elections. The random selection severs the links between police departments and the wider web of prosecutor, corporate, state, and federal incentives that now govern their behavior.

The boards would have direct control over hiring and firing, the prerogative to set and enforce community priorities and objectives for harm response, and to set relationships with other communities (for example, merging departments with a neighboring district). They would rotate membership, with community tenure lasting anywhere from three months to a year, depending on the complexity of the issues at a given point in time. A variety of methods could help ensure that members have the time and energy to devote to their tasks, including provision of child care, paid leave (or direct compensation, for the retired and unemployed), weekend scheduling (as Irelands recent Citizens Assembly used), and other forms of support to the citizens acting as officials of the community.

In the best case, community control over police would come packaged with a broader commitment to sortition, in which case the budget the civilian board managed would be the outcome of a similar process arranging the local budget as a whole. Even in a less than ideal scenario, community control over police would be a marked improvement over the current system. It would be within the boards power to run the operation at any scale below the upper bound of their budget allocation. An abolitionist civilian board could, then, effectively nullify even a pro-police militarization budget from an ideologically opposed city council.

Under the current system, police interact with Black people as if they are helpless subjects. They know, for a fact, that the current power structure allows them to beat, torture, and imprison them with little oversight and accountability. Under community control of the police, community police interacting with Black residents would be interacting with their bosses.

All of the other demands under discussionfrom Campaign Zeros eight regulations on police conduct, to defunding the police, to partial or full abolition of police departmentsare achievable from this starting point. Community control over the police is compatible with each of seasoned abolitionist activist Mariame Kabas seven guidelines for proposals to support on the way to abolishing the police. But the control part is key, which is what separates this proposal from the community policing Kaba rightly criticizes. Community policing is essentially a public relations campaign that aims to put a friendly face on state control of violent force in Black and brown neighborhoods. It is state-run and state-directed, and controlled by the push and pull of the same elite forces that plunder the rest of our economy and social lives. Community control over policeputting the public in chargeis as far from this as possible. A community in control of how order is maintained does not have to grin and bear the decisions of its police. It has the power to hire officers, fire them, fund department initiatives, or abolish policing altogether. This would not require another dollar to go toward police funding.

Moreover, community control over police is the best position from which to reach these other laudable goals. Instead of asking the elite funders of the police to give them less funding this fiscal yeara process reversible during next years budget negotiations, when attention will likely have diminishedwe should demand to be the funders of the police, to permanently and directly determine which dollars go where. Instead of asking those who set police departments rules of engagement and goals to make them in a more community-minded fashion, we should demand to be the agenda setters.

From the bedrock of community control, further goals to defund, abolish, or differently regulate police are no longer requests made to the state, which is full of actors whose incentives are irretrievably aligned with maintaining the general features of the current system. If and where we want to abolish the police, we can use community control over hiring and firing to simply fire departments out of existence. If we seek to defund police (in the sense of redirecting resources to other aspects of community life), we can use community oversight over personnel, priorities, and budgets to shrink departments to the precise size and shape that we want.

The essence of this demand could be materialized in different ways; the rationale of the core demand for community control does not stand or fall with the particular details of any one model. But providing specifics helps keep the conversation rooted in material reality and constructive proposals about what we want the world to look like. This is in keeping with the maturation of a movement from pure opposition to injusticeallowing the current power structure to decide what our rage should mean, institutionally speakingto the advancement of justice.

Undoubtedly, this proposal would incur many practical challenges. It would likely work out unevenly in different districts. It would mean a direct and immediate increase in power for predominantly Black communities, and where abolitionist ideology wins out, communities can vote to take steps to abolish or restructure their police departments without the intervention of lobbyists and careerists. But conservative and/or majority-white policing districts may well vote to retain police departments above the protestations of their Black or POC neighbors. Moreover, within a district, people will disagree bitterly about the priorities that govern how harm is prevented and responded to, whether the community has a police department or not.

Across districts that retain police, we can also expect deep differences. Communities will need to negotiate terms between themprocesses we can expect to be fraught and conflict-ridden. Likely, state law will need to adapt to regulate inter-community relationships and resolve inter-community questions of jurisdiction and harm response.

No proposed reform, or proffered institution, could possibly avoid the problems that stem from differences in political opinionparticularly those that stem from differences in education and socializationand only a deeply authoritarian political project would even try. But could two different, democratically organized communities possibly have a less bridgeable political divide than the one that currently separates the interests of incarcerated, harassed, and brutalized people from the interests of elites who profit financially or politically from their incarceration, harassment, and brutalization?

While we cannot prevent the existence or political salience of ideological differences, we can change the balance of power between competing political views. The ruling elite is not some bastion of progressivism standing between us and the naked bigotry of the unwashed masses. In fact, complex codes of etiquette that pretend otherwise and sanitize oppression are part and parcel of the history of racial domination (and other forms of oppression), in this country and many others. Under the current setup, the tiny minority of decision makers that vote in GEO Group board meetings and backdoor political party gatherings have their bigotry magnified and are functionally unchecked by the vast majority of people, who have no choice but to put up with the structural outcome of elite racial animus, apathy, pure opportunism, or combinations thereof.

Under the Adams-Rameau proposal, the overt white supremacists and misogynists within the ruling elite are diminished to exactly as much influence as the rest of us have: one person, one ballot. We should greatly prefer our chances of successfully confronting harmful ideology through intra- and intercommunity dialogues to confronting the same bigotry in corporations like CoreCivic and Raytheon or the public judicial institutions that force toddlers to mount their own legal defense in deportation hearings.

Nevertheless, the observation that communities will differ in what they choose to do about policing helps explain why the strategic stance of community control over police flows out of a philosophical commitment to abolitionism rather than in opposition to it. Many organizers have done more than imagine alternatives to police and prisons; they have begun building their cultural, communal, and structural foundations. As scholar and veteran abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore points out, our relationship to policing is inseparable from the entirety of human-environmental relations: it concerns our most basic relationships to the value of life and the structures we build in response. The task of abolition, then, is much broader than the restructuring or elimination of any one institution. Though police departments and prisons often house the most violent and spectacular abusers and abuses, other social institutions have also colluded in the broader project of punitive social control and surveillance, particularly of working-class Black people, most notably our schools and welfare programs.

Thus, the cultural work of abolition is absolutely indispensable. Without political education, intracommunal struggle, and a deep reckoning with our fundamental social and political values, we cannot possibly prevent control over police from converting us into agents of our own destruction. For years, practitioners of transformative and restorative justice have modeled the work that communities will need to engage in to counter prevailing cultures of disposability, trans-antagonism, patriarchy, and violence. It is no surprise, then, that feminist, queer- and trans-centered, and/or working-class organizations like Critical Resistance and INCITE have been at the forefront of this work. Without it, we would not be in a position to advance the demand for community control, a demand that owes its plausibility to the historically unprecedented mobilization of mass opposition to anti-Black racism and police brutality that the work of abolitionists and Black Lives Matter helped create.

We should be encouraged by the results from Irelands own experiment with sortition and direct democracy: its Citizens Assembly brought 100 randomly selected members of society to discuss and decide weighty social matters. The results included a string of progressive victories on some of the most politically contentious issues of the day, including on marriage equality, abortion, and climate change.

The problem with policing is power, not prejudice. All of the possibilities for real, lasting, and meaningful change are downstream of community power. Until we demand and organize for power itselfrather than pleading for those who have it to take the actions wed likewe will never get it. And until we get it, we will always be at the mercy of those who have it. They have shown us over the decades whose side they are on: the side of profit, racial hierarchy, and colonial domination and control. Its time we chose ours.

Olfmi O. Tw is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, where he focuses on social/political philosophy and ethics. He is also a member of Pan-African Community Action and an organizer of the Undercommons.

Continued here:

Power Over the Police - Dissent

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report, The Quarantine Report. Im Amy Goodman. As the nationwide uprising against police brutality and racism continues to roil the nation and the world, bringing down Confederate statues and forcing a reckoning in city halls and on the streets, President Trump defended law enforcement Thursday, dismissing growing calls to defund the police. He spoke at a campaign-style event at a church in Dallas, Texas, announcing a new executive order advising police departments to adopt national standards for use of force. Trump did not invite the top three law enforcement officials in Dallas, who are all African American. The move comes after Trump called protesters THUGS and threatened to deploy the U.S. military to end, quote, riots and lawlessness. This is Trump speaking Thursday.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: They want to get rid of the police forces. They actually want to get rid of it. And thats what they do, and thats where theyd go. And you know that, because at the top position, theres not going to be much leadership. Theres not much leadership left.

Instead, we have to go the opposite way. We must invest more energy and resources in police training and recruiting and community engagement. We have to respect our police. We have to take care of our police. Theyre protecting us. And if theyre allowed to do their job, theyll do a great job. And you always have a bad apple no matter where you go. You have bad apples. And there are not too many of them. And I can tell you there are not too many of them in the police department. We all know a lot of members of the police.

AMY GOODMAN: Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is also calling for an increase to police funding. In an op-ed in USA Today, he called for police departments to receive an additional $300 million to, quote, reinvigorate community policing in our country. On Wednesday night, Biden discussed police funding on The Daily Show.

JOE BIDEN: I dont believe police should be defunded, but I think the conditions should be placed upon them where departments are having to take significant reforms relating to that. We should set up a national use-of-force standard.

AMY GOODMAN: But many argue reform will not fix the inherently racist system of policing. Since the global protest movement began, Minneapolis has pledged to dismantle its police department, the mayors of Los Angeles and New York City have promised to slash police department budgets, and calls to defund the police are being heard in spaces that would have been unthinkable just a few weeks ago.

Well, for more on this historic moment, we are spending the hour with the legendary activist and scholar Angela Davis, professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz. For half a century, Angela Davis has been one of the most influential activists and intellectuals in the United States, an icon of the Black liberation movement. Angela Daviss work around issues of gender, race, class and prisons has influenced critical thought and social movements across several generations. Shes a leading advocate for prison abolition, a position informed by her own experience as a prisoner and a fugitive on the FBIs top 10 wanted list more than 40 years ago. Once caught, she faced the death penalty in California. After being acquitted on all charges, shes spent her life fighting to change the criminal justice system.

Angela Davis, welcome back to Democracy Now! Its great to have you with us today for the hour.

ANGELA DAVIS: Thank you very much, Amy. Its wonderful to be here.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, do you think this moment is a tipping point, a turning point? You, who have been involved in activism for almost half a century, do you see this moment as different, perhaps more different than any period of time you have lived through?

ANGELA DAVIS: Absolutely. This is an extraordinary moment. I have never experienced anything like the conditions we are currently experiencing, the conjuncture created by the COVID-19 pandemic and the recognition of the systemic racism that has been rendered visible under these conditions because of the disproportionate deaths in Black and Latinx communities. And this is a moment I dont know whether I ever expected to experience.

When the protests began, of course, around the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and Tony McDade and many others who have lost their lives to racist state violence and vigilante violence when these protests erupted, I remembered something that Ive said many times to encourage activists, who often feel that the work that they do is not leading to tangible results. I often ask them to consider the very long trajectory of Black struggles. And what has been most important is the forging of legacies, the new arenas of struggle that can be handed down to younger generations.

But Ive often said one never knows when conditions may give rise to a conjuncture such as the current one that rapidly shifts popular consciousness and suddenly allows us to move in the direction of radical change. If one does not engage in the ongoing work when such a moment arises, we cannot take advantage of the opportunities to change. And, of course, this moment will pass. The intensity of the current demonstrations cannot be sustained over time, but we will have to be ready to shift gears and address these issues in different arenas, including, of course, the electoral arena.

AMY GOODMAN: Angela Davis, you have long been a leader of the critical resistance movement, the abolition movement. And Im wondering if you can explain the demand, as you see it, what you feel needs to be done, around defunding the police, and then around prison abolition.

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, the call to defund the police is, I think, an abolitionist demand, but it reflects only one aspect of the process represented by the demand. Defunding the police is not simply about withdrawing funding for law enforcement and doing nothing else. And it appears as if this is the rather superficial understanding that has caused Biden to move in the direction hes moving in.

Its about shifting public funds to new services and new institutions mental health counselors, who can respond to people who are in crisis without arms. Its about shifting funding to education, to housing, to recreation. All of these things help to create security and safety. Its about learning that safety, safeguarded by violence, is not really safety.

And I would say that abolition is not primarily a negative strategy. Its not primarily about dismantling, getting rid of, but its about reenvisioning. Its about building anew. And I would argue that abolition is a feminist strategy. And one sees in these abolitionist demands that are emerging the pivotal influence of feminist theories and practices.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that further.

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, I want us to see feminism not only as addressing issues of gender, but rather as a methodological approach of understanding the intersectionality of struggles and issues. Abolition feminism counters carceral feminism, which has unfortunately assumed that issues such as violence against women can be effectively addressed by using police force, by using imprisonment as a solution. And of course we know that Joseph Biden, in 1994, who claims that the Violence Against Women Act was such an important moment in his career the Violence Against Women Act was couched within the 1994 Crime Act, the Clinton Crime Act.

And what were calling for is a process of decriminalization, not recognizing that threats to safety, threats to security, come not primarily from what is defined as crime, but rather from the failure of institutions in our country to address issues of health, issues of violence, education, etc. So, abolition is really about rethinking the kind of future we want, the social future, the economic future, the political future. Its about revolution, I would argue.

AMY GOODMAN: You write in Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, Neoliberal ideology drives us to focus on individuals, ourselves, individual victims, individual perpetrators. But how is it possible to solve the massive problem of racist state violence by calling upon individual police officers to bear the burden of that history and to assume that by prosecuting them, by exacting our revenge on them, we would have somehow made progress in eradicating racism? So, explain what exactly youre demanding.

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, neoliberal logic assumes that the fundamental unit of society is the individual, and I would say the abstract individual. According to that logic, Black people can combat racism by pulling themselves up by their own individual bootstraps. That logic recognizes or fails, rather, to recognize that there are institutional barriers that cannot be brought down by individual determination. If a Black person is materially unable to attend the university, the solution is not affirmative action, they argue, but rather the person simply needs to work harder, get good grades and do what is necessary in order to acquire the funds to pay for tuition. Neoliberal logic deters us from thinking about the simpler solution, which is free education.

Im thinking about the fact that we have been aware of the need for these institutional strategies at least since 1935 but of course before, but Im choosing 1935 because that was the year when W.E.B. Du Bois published his germinal Black Reconstruction in America. And the question was not what should individual Black people do, but rather how to reorganize and restructure post-slavery society in order to guarantee the incorporation of those who had been formerly enslaved. The society could not remain the same or should not have remained the same. Neoliberalism resists change at the individual level. It asks the individual to adapt to conditions of capitalism, to conditions of racism.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Angela Davis, about the monuments to racists, colonizers, Confederates, that are continuing to fall across the United States and around the world. In St. Paul, Minnesota, Wednesday, activists with the American Indian Movement tied a rope around a statue of Christopher Columbus and pulled it from its pedestal on the state Capitol grounds. The AIM members then held a ceremony over the fallen monument. In Massachusetts, officials said theyll remove a Columbus statue from a park in Bostons North End, after it was beheaded by protesters early Wednesday morning. In Richmond, Virginia, protesters toppled a statue of Confederate President Jefferson Davis from Monument Avenue Wednesday night. In the nearby city of Portsmouth, protesters used sledgehammers to destroy a monument to Confederate soldiers. One person sustained a serious injury, was hospitalized after a statue fell on his head. In Washington, D.C., House Speaker Nancy Pelosi joined other lawmakers demanding the removal of 11 Confederate statues from the National Statuary Hall in the Capitol.

Meanwhile, President Trump said he will not even consider renaming U.S. Army bases named after Confederate military officers. There are 10 such bases, all of them in Southern states. Trump tweeted Wednesday, These Monumental and very Powerful Bases have become part of a Great American Heritage, and a history of Winning, Victory, and Freedom, unquote. Trumps tweet contradicted Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair General Mark Milley, who suggested theyre open to discussion about renaming the bases. And a Republican committee in the Senate just voted to rename these bases, like Benning and Bragg and Hood, that are named for Confederate leaders.

Meanwhile, in your hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, Angela, comedian Jermaine Johnson is pleading not guilty to charges of inciting a riot after he urged protesters at May 31st rally to march on a statue of Charles Linn, a former officer in the Confederate Navy.

Did you think you would ever see this? You think about Bree Newsome after the horror at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, who shimmied up that flagpole on the grounds of the South Carolina Legislature and took down the Confederate flag, and they put it right on back up. What about what were seeing today?

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, of course, Bree Newsome was a wonderful pioneer. And I think its important to link this trend to the campaign in South Africa, Rhodes Must Fall. And, of course, I think this reflects the extent to which we are being called upon to deeply reflect on the role of historical racisms that have brought us to the point where we are today.

You know, racism should have been immediately confronted in the aftermath of the end of slavery. This is what Dr. Du Boiss analysis was all about, not so much in terms of, Well, what we were going to do about these poor people who have been enslaved so many generations? but, rather, How can we reorganize our society in order to guarantee the incorporation of previously enslaved people?

Now attention is being turned towards the symbols of slavery, the symbols of colonialism. And, of course, any campaigns against racism in this country have to address, in the very first place, the conditions of Indigenous people. I think its important that were seeing these demonstrations, but I think at the same time we have to recognize that we cannot simply get rid of the history. We have to recognize the devastatingly negative role that that history has played in charting the trajectory of the United States of America. And so, I think that these assaults on statues represent an attempt to begin to think through what we have to do to bring down institutions and reenvision them, reorganize them, create new institutions that can attend to the needs of all people.

AMY GOODMAN: And what do you think should be done with statues, for example, to, oh, slaveholding Founding Fathers, like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson?

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, you know, museums can play an important educational role. And I dont think we should get rid of all of the vestiges of the past, but we need to figure out context within which people can understand the nature of U.S. history and the role that racism and capitalism and heteropatriarchy have played in forging that history.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about racism and capitalism? You often write and speak about how they are intimately connected. And talk about a world that you envision.

ANGELA DAVIS: Yeah, racism is integrally linked to capitalism. And I think its a mistake to assume that we can combat racism by leaving capitalism in place. As Cedric Robinson pointed out in his book Black Marxism, capitalism is racial capitalism. And, of course, to just say for a moment, that Marx pointed out that what he called primitive accumulation, capital doesnt just appear from nowhere. The original capital was provided by the labor of slaves. The Industrial Revolution, which pivoted around the production of capital, was enabled by slave labor in the U.S. So, I am convinced that the ultimate eradication of racism is going to require us to move toward a more socialist organization of our economies, of our other institutions. I think we have a long way to go before we can begin to talk about an economic system that is not based on exploitation and on the super-exploitation of Black people, Latinx people and other racialized populations.

But I do think that we now have the conceptual means to engage in discussions, popular discussions, about capitalism. Occupy gave us new language. The notion of the prison-industrial complex requires us to understand the globalization of capitalism. Anti-capitalist consciousness helps us to understand the predicament of immigrants, who are barred from the U.S. by the wall that has been created by the current occupant. These conditions have been created by global capitalism. And I think this is a period during which we need to begin that process of popular education, which will allow people to understand the interconnections of racism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism.

AMY GOODMAN: Angela, do you think we need a truth and reconciliation commission here in this country?

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, that might be one way to begin, but I know were going to need a lot more than truth and reconciliation. But certainly we need truth. Im not sure how soon reconciliation is going to emerge. But I think that the whole notion of truth and reconciliation allows us to think differently about the criminal legal system. It allows us to imagine a form of justice that is not based on revenge, a form of justice that is not retributive. So I think that those ideas can help us begin to imagine new ways of structuring our institutions, such as well, not structuring the prison, because the whole point is that we have to abolish that institution in order to begin to envision new ways of addressing the conditions that lead to mass incarceration, that lead to such horrendous tragedies as the murder of George Floyd.

AMY GOODMAN: Were going to come back to this discussion and also talk about President Trump going to Tulsa on Juneteenth. Were speaking with Angela Davis, the world-renowned abolitionist, author, activist and professor emerita at University of California, Santa Cruz, author of many books, including Freedom Is a Constant Struggle. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: Shanty Tones by Filastine. This is Democracy Now! The Quarantine Report. Im Amy Goodman, as we spend the hour with the legendary activist, scholar, Angela Davis, professor emerita at University of California, Santa Cruz.

President Trump has announced hes holding his first campaign rally since the quarantine, since lockdowns across the country, since the pandemic. Hes holding it in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 19th a highly symbolic day. It was June 19, 1865, that enslaved Africans in Texas first learned they were free, two years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. The day is now celebrated as Juneteenth. California Senator Kamala Harris tweeted in response, This isnt just a wink to white supremacists hes throwing them a welcome home party, unquote.

Well, Tulsa recently marked the 99th anniversary of one of the deadliest mass killings of African Americans in U.S. history. In 1921, a white mob killed as many as 300 people, most of them Black, after a Black man was accused of assaulting a white woman. The white mobs destroyed a thriving African American business district known at the time as the Black Wall Street of America.

Well, this all comes as a Tulsa police major is coming under fire after denying systemic racism in the police force there and saying African Americans probably should be shot more. Listen carefully. This is Major Travis Yates in an interview with KFAQ.

MAJ. TRAVIS YATES: If a certain group is committing more crimes, more violent crimes, then that number is going to be higher. Who in the world in their right mind would think that our shootings should be right along the U.S. census line? All of the research says were shooting African Americans about 24% less than we probably ought to be, based on the crimes being committed.

AMY GOODMAN: Were shooting them less than they probably ought to be? Tulsas mayor and police chief have both blasted Yates for the comment, but he remains on the force. And on Friday, President Trump will be there. Angela Davis, your thoughts on the significance of the moment, the place?

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, thats well, you know, I cant even respond to anything he does anymore. Its just so, so, so, so ridiculous. And it is, however, important to recognize that he represents a sector of the population in this country that wants to return to the past Make America great again with all of its white supremacy, with all of its misogyny. And I think that at this moment we are recognizing that we cannot be held back by such forces as those represented by the current occupant of the White House. I doubt very seriously whether the people who come out to hear him in Tulsa on this historic day of course, all over the country, people of African descent will be observing Juneteenth as an emancipatory moment in our history.

But I think that our role is to start to begin to translate some of the energy and passion into transforming institutions. The process has already begun, and it cant be turned back, at least not by the current occupant of the White House. Im not suggesting that its easy to create lasting change, but at least now we can see that it is possible. When someone like Roger Goodell says Black lives matter, even though he did not mention Colin Kaepernick, and even though he may have he probably did not really mean it, what that means is that the NFL recognizes that it has to begin a new process, that there is a further expansion of popular consciousness.

In New York, of course, you need to ask whether you really want to create new jails in the boroughs in the aftermath of closing Rikers, or whether you need new services. You know, Ive been thinking about the case of Jussie Smollett, and Im wondering why in Chicago, given the conditions surrounding the murder of Laquan McDonald, the police department should be thoroughly investigated. And we need to ask: How is it that the public could so easily be rallied to the police narrative of what happened in the case of Jussie Smollett?

So, there is so much to be done. And I think that the rallies that the current occupant of the White House is holding will fade into dont even merit footnotes in history.

AMY GOODMAN: Angela Davis, I wanted to ask you about another event thats taking place on Juneteenth, on June 19th. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute is finally going to issue you the Fred L. Shuttlesworth Award during a virtual event on Juneteenth. And I wanted to ask you about this, because you returned to your hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, last February after the institute had at first rescinded the award due to your support for BDS Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and your support of Palestinians. After outcry, the institute reversed its decision. More than 3,000 people gathered to see you talk at an alternative event to honor you, which was hosted by the Birmingham Committee for Truth and Reconciliation. This is a clip of your comments that day.

ANGELA DAVIS: It became clear to me that this might actually be a teachable moment.

IMANI PERRY: Yes.

ANGELA DAVIS: That we might seize this moment to reflect on what it means to live on this planet in the 21st century and our responsibilities not only to people in our immediate community, but to people all over the planet.

AMY GOODMAN: We were there covering this amazing moment, where the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute had rescinded the award to you, the Fred L. Shuttlesworth Award, went through enormous turmoil. The mayor of Birmingham, so many people across the spectrum criticized them for it, but then this process happened, and you are going to be awarded this. Can you talk about the significance of this moment? And what do you plan to say on Juneteenth, the day that President Trump will be in Tulsa?

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, thank you for reminding me that these two events are happening on the same day. And, of course, that was, I think, the last time I actually saw you in person, Amy, in Birmingham. A lot has happened over the last period, including within the context of the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. They have completely reorganized. They have reorganized their board. They have been involved in conversations with the community. Of course, as you know, the mayor of Birmingham was threatening to withdraw funding from the institute. There was a generalized uprising in the Black community.

And, you know, while at first it was a total shock to me that they offered this award to me, and then they rescinded it, Im realizing now that that was an important moment, because it encouraged people to think about the meaning of human rights and why is it that Palestinians could be excluded from the process of working toward human rights. Palestinian activists have long supported Black peoples struggle against racism. When I was in jail, solidarity coming from Palestine was a major source of courage for me. In Ferguson, Palestinians were the first to express international solidarity. And there has been this very important connection between the two struggles for many decades, so that Im going to be really happy to receive the award, which now represents a rethinking of the rather backward position that the institute assumed, that Palestinians could be excluded from the circle of those working toward a future of justice, equality and human rights.

AMY GOODMAN: Speaking about whats going on in the West Bank right now and about the whole issue of international solidarity, the global response to the killing of George Floyd. In the occupied West Bank, protesters denounced Floyds murder and the recent killing of Iyad el-Hallak, a 32-year-old Palestinian special needs student who was shot to death by Israeli forces in occupied East Jerusalem. He was reportedly chanting Black lives matter and Palestinian lives matter, when Israeli police gunned him down, claiming he was armed. These links that youre seeing, not only in Palestine and the United States, but around the world, the kind of global response, the tens of thousands of people who marched in Spain, who marched in England, in Berlin, in Munich, all over the world, as this touches a chord and they make demands in their own countries, not only in solidarity with whats happening in the United States? And then I want to ask you about the U.S. election thats coming up in November.

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, yes, Palestinian activists have long supported Black peoples struggle against racism, as I pointed out. And Im hoping that todays young activists recognize how important Palestinian solidarity has been to the Black cause, and that they recognize that we have a profound responsibility to support Palestinian struggles, as well.

I think its also important for us to look in the direction of Brazil, whose current political leader competes with our current political leader in many dangerous ways, I would say. Brazil if we think we have a problem with racist police violence in the United States of America, look at Brazil. Marielle Franco was assassinated because she was challenging the militarization of the police and the racist violence unleashed there. I think 4,000 people were killed last year alone by the police in Brazil. So, Im saying this because

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, the president of Brazil, a close ally of President Trump. We only have two minutes, and I want to get to the election. When I interviewed you in 2016, you said you wouldnt support either main-party candidate at the time. What are your thoughts today for 2020?

ANGELA DAVIS: Well, my position really hasnt changed. Im not going to actually support either of the major candidates. But I do think we have to participate in the election. I mean, that isnt to say that I wont vote for the Democratic candidate. What Im saying is that in our electoral system as it exists, neither party represents the future that we need in this country. Both parties remain connected to corporate capitalism. But the election will not so much be about who gets to lead the country to a better future, but rather how we can support ourselves and our own ability to continue to organize and place pressure on those in power. And I dont think theres a question about which candidate would allow that process to unfold.

So I think that were going to have to translate some of the passion that has characterized these demonstrations into work within the electoral arena, recognizing that the electoral arena is not the best place for the expression of radical politics. But if we want to continue this work, we certainly need a person in office who will be more amenable to our mass pressure. And to me, that is the only thing that someone like a Joe Biden represents. But we have to persuade people to go out and vote to guarantee that the current occupant of the White House is forever ousted.

AMY GOODMAN: Angela Davis, I want to thank you so much for this hour, world-renowned abolitionist, author, activist, professor emerita at the University of California, Santa Cruz, author of many books, including Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Im Amy Goodman. Thanks so much for joining us. Stay safe.

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Angela Davis on Abolition, Calls to Defund Police, Toppled Racist Statues & Voting in 2020 Election - Democracy Now!

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Joey Grihalva is a MPS teacher, writer and author of Milwaukee Jazz.

On June 7, a veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledged to dismantle their police department and replace it with a new system of public safety.

The dramatic decisiona first for a major American citywas made nearly two weeks after the death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department, which sparked what may become the largest sustained protest movement since the Civil Rights era.

A few days prior, in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Gov. Tony Evers said that police policy needs a major overhaul, but he does not support defunding and abolishing the police. I think he may be wrong. Here is why.

A series of questions

In the summer of 2000, I was 14 years old. One day, I was hanging out on Milwaukees East Side with a friend, who is black. It was getting late and we needed to get back home, but we didnt know where to catch the bus. We were standing on the corner outside of Oakland Gyros when I spotted two police officers walking toward the restaurant.

Excuse me, officer, do you know where the 60 bus picks up around here?

No response. Both officers walked right past us. One of them had a smirk on his face.

As innocuous as that interaction may have been, it left a lasting impression and made my young mind wonder, Who do the police protect and serve?

Television shows and movies tell us that the police protect us from the bad guys, but it has never been that simple.

Before the incident outside of Oakland Gyros, my understanding of police negligence was shaped by the beating of Rodney King. The takeaway from that case was clear enough for a 6-year-old to understand police can beat a black person within an inch of their life and face no legal repercussions, even if theres video evidence. The psychological impact of Rodney King has reverberated for generations.

Growing up a white kid with a brown father and a black best friend in Sherman Park, I became hyper aware at an early age of how race is a source of identity and a cultural force. It wasnt until high school and college that I learned about institutional racism.

Thats when I learned about the intricacies of slavery. I learned about segregation and Jim Crow laws. I learned about the prohibition of interracial marriage. I learned about the Ku Klux Klan and public lynchings, which is to say, I learned about domestic terrorism against black people. I learned how black people were left out of the New Deal and the GI Bill. I learned about redlining and white flight. I learned about the wealth gap. I learned about disparities in public school funding and drug sentencing. I learned about the criminal justice system, the prison-industrial complex, and mass incarceration. I learned about gerrymandering and voter suppression. I learned about implicit bias and double standards.

This knowledge led me to a new question: Do the police combat institutional racism or do they enforce it?

The third question I ask myself when thinking about the police and their role in American society is much more fundamental.

How do you feel when you see a police officer?

If the answer were the same for every American, if we all agreed that seeing a police officer makes us feel safe, then there would be a strong argument against criticizing the police. But that is simply not the case.

By and large, Americans of color fear the police, especially if the officer is white. There are people of color who refuse to call the police out of fear that upon their arrival, the caller will be mistaken for the perpetrator. That is an irreconcilable relationship.

This is the reality (we hope) the rest of the country (and world) is waking up to since the murder of George Floyd.

Having answered this essential question, lets take a closer look at the two more specific questions.

To start, lets consider an incident that occurred recently in the town of Monona, which is near Madison.

Who do the police protect and serve?

On June 2, a young black man named Keonte Furdge, a former football player at Monona Grove High School, was standing on a porch. The porch is connected to a house owned by one of Furdges former football coaches. It was the home of the coachs mother until her recent passing.

Furdges former coach had let Toren Young, Furdges friend and another former Monona Grove football player, live at the house. Furdge had lost his job due to the COVID-19 pandemic and was staying with Young for a few days. Both young men were familiar with the neighborhood from when they did chores for their coachs mother.

It was about 9 a.m. when Furdge was on the porch talking on his phone. About 20 minutes after he went inside the police showed up. A neighbor, presuming he was an intruder, had called them to investigate.

When the police entered the house, they drew their guns, barked orders and questioned Furdge, who was compliant. Still, the officers handcuffed Furdge and did not lower their weapons until receiving confirmation that he was not an intruder.

Now imagine if Furdge had responded combatively. Imagine if he had a black hair brush in his hand when the police walked in. Imagine if he had a legally licensed firearm. What might have happened then?

We could be hearing Keonte Furdge chanted in the streets.

In this situation, who did the police protect and serve? Keonte Furdge or the fearful white neighbor?

It cannot be said enough, that it is not merely the death of George Floyd, or any of the documented deaths of people of color at the hands of the police, it is also the countless incidents like the one in Monona that is fueling this wave of protests, which have brought together people of all ages, abilities, orientations and skin tones.

Since the protests began, a new question has emerged: If you join the protests, even if you are peaceful, do the police protect and serve you?

We have seen too many videos and heard too many accounts suggesting they do not. Take the 75-year-old man in Buffalo who was shoved to the ground by police, his head bleeding as other officers callously walk past his body. This is an egregious, well-known example, but there are more.

Do the police combat institutional racism, or do they enforce it?

A cursory reading of American history reveals that police have actively enforced institutional racism. Police are, after all, agents of the state. If the state has a racist law, it is by definition the polices job to enforce it. Additionally, it was not uncommon for police officers to be members of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups.

We would like to think that things have changed. Yet, at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., the Thin Blue Line flag (a symbol of police solidarity) was flown by white supremacists alongside Confederate flags, suggesting they view police as integral to enforcing white supremacy.

As I have learned, racism may not be as overt these days, but it remains in covert, systemic ways. Here is one example.

On June 5, the Milwaukee Common Council held a special meeting to discuss the Milwaukee Police Departments use of force against protesters and the implementation of a curfew. Police Chief Alfonso Morales was not in attendance, so Assistant Chief Michael Brunson spoke on behalf of MPD.

In one exchange, Ald. Chantia Lewis asked Brunson to explain how peaceful, unarmed protesters can be deemed an unlawful assembly and dispersed with tear gas and rubber bullets, while heavily armed protesters at gun rights rallies or the Re-open the economy rallies we saw earlier last month are free to walk the streets with military-grade assault rifles.

Brunson reiterated MPDs stance that no peaceful protests have been met with force. A protest can be deemed an unlawful assembly when someone in the crowd engages in behavior that can put police officers or the public in harm. That can simply mean one person throwing a water bottle. On the flip side, Brunson said that citizens have a right to carry guns if they are not a felon and have a license.

Lewis asked if his officers approach such people to see if they have a license and to identify whether or not they are a felon. Brunsons response is telling.

If you look at the law, as it relates, if there is nothing to indicate that this person is a felon, then we cant just go and pre-emptively stop individuals who are exercising their right to carry those rifles.

That is the law, as it pertains to the overwhelmingly white, heavily armed protesters we have seen around this country. They get the benefit of the doubt.

Meanwhile, unarmed people of color are pre-emptively stopped by the police time and time again, with no pretense besides the color of their skin. This is not conjecture, it is well-documented. And in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, disparities in policing social distancing have followed the same racist logic.

Milwaukees biggest protest so far took place on June 6. It began at the North Point Water Tower and stopped in the suburbs of Shorewood and Whitefish Bay. One of the organizers, Darius Smith, said it was important for him to take the march into Whitefish Bay because it was there that he experienced two episodes of racial profiling by the police when he was young.

The first time, Smith was driving his car and the second time he was walking down the street. In both cases, a police officer stopped him and asked, What are you doing here? In both cases the officer had no conceivable reason to stop Smith. He was simply a black man in Whitefish Bay.

If we could ask those officers why they stopped Smith, I suspect their response would be, I was just doing my job.

And that is the problem.

What can be done?

Since the protests began, there has been much talk, both in the streets and online, about defunding and abolishing the police. This is not a new idea. There are organizations that have been researching and advocating the issue for decades. As quickly as the idea to defund the police is gaining traction, it is just as quickly being dismissed as too idealistic and impractical.

So why then has it suddenly entered the mainstream? Maybe because police reform efforts have failed communities of color? Is that not the underlying message of this movement?

During the Milwaukee Common Council meeting, Assistant Chief Brunson looked over the 8 Cant Wait reform initiatives that many American cities are calling on their police departments to adopt. Brunson claimed that MPD has most of them already in place, and the others would hinder their ability to do their job.

As a public-school teacher, I can understand not wanting to be micromanaged by an administrative body. However, unlike police officers, as a teacher, I am held to a zero-tolerance standard when it comes to using physical force against my students. Yet Brunson and the MPD want credit for the great restraint they have shown during this time.

Please. I have had things thrown at me in the classroom, and I have been able to resist using retaliatory physical force every single time. I wish I could say the same about the police.

Before you say, Well, those are children, police deal with adults, let me inform you that police have pepper sprayed, tear gassed and shot rubber bullets at children and teenagers all over this country in the past three weeks alone. Also, let us remember that Tamir Rice, who was shot and killed by a Cleveland police officer in 2014 for having a toy gun, was 12 years old.

The fact is that the police do not want to be reformed. Their unions have fought tooth and nail against such efforts.

Look at what happened in the aftermath of the senior citizen being shoved to the ground in Buffalo. The two officers involved were suspended. Then 57 of their fellow officers resigned from the emergency response team, not because of the conduct of the two officers, but because of the fact that they faced repercussions. This is abhorrent and indicative of how resistant police are to accountability.

Not only are the police unwilling to reform or self-correct, they fabricate reports to cover up their abuse. It happened in the George Floyd case (police falsely claimed he was resisting arrest) and it happened in the Buffalo incident (police falsely claimed the old man tripped). We can only imagine how many times police have lied when there wasnt video evidence to set the record straight.

In his interview with the Journal Sentinel, Evers claimed that most law enforcement are in the profession for the right reason. Anyone who is critical of the police has heard a version of this response. But the existence of good cops doesnt account for a bad system and a toxic culture.

Abolition as a process, not a quick fix

One of my favorite sad but true tweets from the past couple of weeks goes something like this, Defunding the police seems like a radical idea until you realize weve been defunding education for decades.

The fact is that police budgets are excessive while other social sectors are underfunded. Just look at the expensive riot gear police have been wearing compared to what health care workers have had to work with during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As such, we should start by divesting public money from the police and investing it in institutions and initiatives that address the root causes of crime, namely education, mental health, poverty, homelessness and drug abuse.

We tried a similar approach in the 1960s and 1970s with the War on Poverty, but the political winds changed, Ronald Reagan became president, and it was abandoned. A turbo-charged War on Drugs took its place, ravaging communities of color in the process. We cannot let history repeat itself.

I must acknowledge that there is an elephant in the room, pun intended.

If it is this hard to convince a Democratic governor to defund the police, how can we expect the other side to even listen? After all, they either dont believe that racism is a problem and that police abuse their power, or they welcome police abuse toward people of color.

To be honest, I dont have an answer to that question. Nor do I pretend to know exactly how a world without police would operate. But I do know that their place in the public imagination has been wildly inflated by their portrayal in Hollywood. I know that instead of alleviating the inequities faced by communities of color, the police exacerbate those inequities. I know that reform efforts have not worked. And I know that, as The Guardian points out, the tragic irony of the recent protests about police brutality is that they have been met with waves of police brutality.

In the three decades since the exoneration of the officers who beat Rodney King, there have been far too many acquittals of killer cops. Lets not hold our breath for the outcome of the George Floyd case. Lets shift the paradigm.

Now is the time to start the process of abolishing the police. This is not something that will happen overnight. It will not work unless we also dismantle systemic racism across the board. But it is a logical solution to the public health crisis of racism.

There will be those that say abolition is a distraction from larger institutional issues like the laws and judges that disproportionately send black people to prison, or the educational systems that fail to teach black children. They will say that the police merely enforce and uphold an unjust, racist system, so if we get rid of the police we will be left with the same system and all its ramifications.

There will also be those that say conservatives will use this call to abolish the police as a cudgel to thwart incremental electoral gains in the coming election.

Let them say what they will say. I believe that this call and the momentum behind it are not a distraction. This is an opportunity.

In this moment of national reckoning, abolishing the police can be the opening act to a radical reimagining of society. If we dismantle law enforcement as we know it, we will have no choice but to work together to create a more just, equitable and peaceful society.

America can no longer afford to ignore its history. If we continue to look away from the sins of our past, we are doomed to repeat them.

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OPINION: How the push to abolish police departments could lead to lasting change in America - Milwaukee Neighborhood News Service

On Sunday, lawmakers in the city of Minneapolis, Minnesota announced that they had been listening. As a result of sustained local, national, and international protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, by Minneapolis police city council members told a community rally that they would seek to defund and abolish the Minneapolis Police Department.

The announcement is the most major in a cluster of measures being implemented across the US to take away funding from their police departments. Also on Sunday (the 7th of June), New York mayor Bill De Blasio pledged to divert funding from the NYPD and into social services, while last week, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti promised that $250 million would be taken from police budgets and funnelled into jobs, health and community initiatives. The mayor of Seattle, Jenny Durkan, has also committed to reviewing the citys police budget.

As more cities interrogate the role of the police in the US, many in the UK now ask what police defunding and eventual abolition might look like at home. Is it possible? What sort of community-based initiatives could we establish instead of policing? Would we see youth workers, counsellors, mental health professionals and drug case workers becoming first responders? And what would be the results of these changes?

To find out, we asked experts Richard Garside of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies, University of Greenwich sociologist Dr. Adam Elliott-Cooper, and anti-racism campaigner, abolitionist and former Metropolitan police officer Adam Pugh, to take us through the hypothetical abolition of the London Metropolitan Police over the course of one, three and five years.

First of all, its important to provide some context against which police defunding in the UK would happen. In the early noughties, the Labour government threw money at police and what we saw was a massive expansion in the number of officers everywhere, including in London, Garside explains. After this, as part of the austerity measures, we saw a scaling back of these numbers. So, were in a situation where people in this country believe that we dont have that many police but were not short on them at all. There are more police now than there were during the miners strikes under Thatcher.

As far as what sort of defunding might happen in the period of one year, Dr. Elliott-Cooper explains that there are various areas within policing and the Met the largest police force in the UK which could be divested from and defunded immediately, many of which cause particular harm to Black and other minority ethnic communities.

The first should be the end of drugs policing and drugs stop and search, he tells me. Stop and search allows officers to question members of the public at random, with BAME people four times more likely than a white person to be stopped. It is, Elliott-Cooper says, a very police intensive exercise, does nothing in terms of improving public safety, and requires a huge amount of person power and human hours. The second one would be disbanding the Prevent agenda.

Prevent is a government counter-terror initiative which attempts to use schools, universities, workplaces, and other institutions to identify people who are at supposed risk of radicalisation, and which has been heavily criticised for its extreme use of surveillance, and, as Elliott-Cooper notes, has been used to criminalise lots of communities, the very high majority of whom are non-white. It also, he tells me, requires a huge amount of communications infrastructure, and its made very little difference to public safety.

Image by Alex Rorison

Thirdly, he continues, we should see an end to what David Cameron called the all-out war on gangs and gang culture. This policy, instigated following the 2011 London riots (themselves caused by the police killing of a Black man, Mark Duggan), uses a huge amount of surveillance, huge amounts of technology, IT and communications infrastructure, and its been used to criminalise mainly Black communities. And the fourth area which should be defunded immediately would be the hostile environment policy the way in which the police are raiding homes, workplaces, and institutions, just to try to find people who are undocumented and immigration deportations and detentions. They make no improvement on public safety, and are very resource intensive.

In this one year period, Dr. Elliott-Cooper tells me, the funds from these policing areas should be quickly redirected instead into womens refuges, youth services and greater funding for mental health provision, particularly for young people.

The real meat of defunding the police is in refunding the organisations and initiatives who should be doing work that is currently the part of the polices remit. Pugh, therefore, is keen to remind me that abolition is not simply about defunding the police, meaning that stripping away their budgets in isolation somehow will magically reduce police violence or crime. Neither is abolition the idea that we simply get rid of the police and all of the problems are solved. This is about making sure that instead of investing in punitive measures like policing and prisons, we invest in addressing the social conditions and social inequality that has created the response of policing. He highlights areas such as the NHS, housing and unemployment as those which are in drastic need of money and attention.

Garside gives a real world example to show the practicalities of a redistribution of funds: When Boris Johnson was the Mayor of London, he spent a lot of money on some fairly knackered water cannons from Germany. The Met didnt end up using them, of course, and when Sadiq Khan became Mayor, he committed to selling those cannons and investing the profits in youth services, he says. Im not sure whether that actually happened Im not sure who would have wanted to buy them but it illustrates fairly well what divesting money from the police and into public services looks like. (The water cannons were ultimately sold for scrap at a loss.)

For Elliott-Cooper, this means new, well-funded resources like mental health first-responders. We need to have properly trained mental health professionals that people can call if they see somebody having a mental health crisis. So that rather than the police being called, where the persons safety is put at risk, where the police arent trained, and theyre more likely to use violence towards that individual, particularly if theyre Black, we can have better trained mental health services for people in our communities.

Similarly, drug workers and experts might play a similar role, he explains. These would be people who are trained to work with people with addiction problems, and to help them to access clean needles, and the care they might need to stop using drugs in ways that mean that they or others can come to harm. That is far more effective than locking people up for taking drugs, which is basically our current policy.

Elliott-Cooper also suggests that we could see the reopening of youth centres over a three year period, as more funding would move from policing and into youth services. In London alone, over 100 youth clubs have closed since 2011, and we need to reopen those youth clubs. These buildings havent been demolished many of them are still there. Wed also need to rehire the approximately 3,500 youth workers whove lost their job since austerity was introduced. Theyre far better trained than police officers at conflict mediation and identifying young people at risk of being affected by violence or problematic drug use, and bring far less harm to the community, he says.

Photo by Alex Rorison

All of the experts I speak to remind me that police abolition is a very long term goal, which would necessitate other very structural changes. Elliott-Cooper notes that investment in council housing, public sector jobs and education, for example, is foundational to a society without policing.

Pugh agrees. He tells me, There is no quick fix solution. There can only be a long term strategy with regards to abolition or defunding the police as a strategy. So on this basis, it is unlikely that within five years time the police would not still exist, but hopefully we would be well on our way to the goal of them not existing, and would have seen money reinvested elsewhere. We hear about spending upwards of 500 million a year on 20,000 additional police officers not to mention a huge amount on things like tasers and body cams that we know do not and will not reduce crime or keep our communities safer.

Fundamentally, then, Pugh sees abolition as the only way forward. The point is that policing isnt working, and will never work I say that as somebody who has been a police officer. Reform hasnt been working for a long time, he tells me. We now need to move beyond reform and begin to reimagine what our entire justice system might look like, taking steps towards the actualisation of that goal.

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What Would Happen If We Defunded Police in the UK? - VICE UK