Monthly Archives: May 2021

Over the past year, we have experienced unprecedented conditions and needs for organizing work: a restriction on in-person gathering and increased reliance on digital mediums, a historic uprising for Black lives that swept across the continent all summer long and the widespread expansion of abolitionist thought and practice. This convergence and preceding oppressive conditions led to the formal creation of the Cops Off Campus Coalition in fall 2020. Drawing on long histories of liberatory movements, this coalition brings together over 60 abolitionist organizations and campaigns on university campuses across the United States and Canada. We are students, alumni and workers at institutions miles apart, united around three central demands:

We are rising up to demand all cops off of all campuses be they public or private, K-12, university or college; we demand the land back into Indigenous hands; and we demand a campus and community that are truly free and safe for all.

At Stanford University specifically, we demand the following:

Colleges and universities spend millions of dollars on their police forces; Stanford University spends roughly $25 million on its Department of Public Safety alone, or roughly one-third of the entire budget for the Office of Student Affairs (and its 29 offices combined). To our knowledge, this is one of the most expensive campus police departments in the country: UC Berkeley spends $3 million less for a campus population over twice our size. This spending occurs while states cut appropriations for higher education and schools impose layoffs, furlough workers, slash wages and more amid the pandemic.

Yet none of this increased spending, militarization and policing leaves us any more safe. In 2015, Sam DuBose, an unarmed Black man, was shot and killed by a University of Cincinnati police officer during a traffic stop. In 2017, campus police killed Georgia Tech student Scout Schultz during a period of distress due to mental illness. In 2018, the University of Chicago Police Department shot Charles Thomas, a fourth-year Black student, during a mental health crisis. Also in 2018, Portland State University fired at Jason Washington 17 times and killed him as he was trying to break up a fight. A Yale campus officer was one of two officers who shot Stephanie Washington, an unarmed Black woman, in New Haven in 2019. In the past decade, California State University police officers have killed two unarmed people of color and maintained a jail on the CSU Northridge campus. The University of California police system has a history of using its police departments to brutalize students and to surveil and assault activists. And in 2002, an SUDPS deputy was involved in the fatal shooting of Pedro Calderon at the base of the Stanford foothills.

These countless incidents of repression, racial profiling, brutality and violence fundamentalcharacteristics of policing, inherent to its design are why we choose to join the national Cops off Campus Coalitions May 3 Day of Refusal.

On Monday, May 3, we join the countless students, faculty and staff who are absenting themselves from work, class, teaching and all forms of university labor. We cannot be complicit in the violence of our institutions. Students, faculty, staff, alumni, any group affiliated with the University we must use our respective positionalities to pressure our institutions to take care of us and our communities. At profit-hungry universities, this wont happen on its own. We have to mobilize our people power and demand change. So, we encourage all members of all campus communities, whether or not classes are in session at their institution, to withhold their labor on May 3 in solidarity with the movement to abolish campus police and all police in general.

On May 3, we will gather at White Plaza to hear and see a chorus of campaigns joined in this struggle, which will be streamed across multiple platforms at 11 a.m. PT. We will continue to hold this space for folks interested in abolition and our work, until and through the nation-wide dance party event at 1 p.m. PT. This Day of Refusal across Turtle Island is only the beginning of Abolition May, a series of direct actions taken up by member campuses throughout the month, beginning with all campuses on May 3 and community events on May 25 in honor of the life of George Floyd, who was murdered by Minneapolis police on May 25, 2020. Each campaign has its own individual targets, demands and tactics, but all unite under one principled demand: an end to campus policing.

Read the full Day of Refusal pledge, signed by over 170 members and organizations of our campus community, here.

Abolish Stanford

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Op-Ed | Join the May 3 Day of Refusal - The Stanford Daily

During the trial of now-convicted former police officer Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd, Americans waited to see if the criminal justice system valued Black life. While the wake of the verdict was a cause for celebration for many, it was the opposite for the families of Daunte Wright and Ma'Khia Bryant. Wright was killed at the age of 20 during Chauvins trial. Bryant was killed at the age of 16 the day the verdict was announced.

Clearly, neither the national attention around the trial nor the guilty verdict of one officer prevented the police state from continuing to take Black lives. Yet, only 18% of Americans believe the criminal justice system needs a complete overhaul because guilty verdicts of crooked cops are paraded, like bandaids on bullet holes, as proof that this system works. The problem is that murderers being held accountable after the fact will not prevent the execution of Black people by our institutions.

That is why we need to abolish the police state.

The idea of abolition has been stigmatized and made to seem radical, but freedom from policing is not unfamiliar to those living in White suburbia, who do not see police patrolling their streets in the same way that diverse, urban communities do. Dr. Sandibel Borges, a women and gender studies professor, explained to me that this is because of the police states role in upholding white supremacy. The way that law enforcement works now in the US is rooted in slave patrols, she explained, During times of slavery, people would actually volunteer to catch people who had been enslaved and who had ran away. And so that's sort of like the infrastructure of how law enforcement works today.

Police officers are trained to kill when feeling threatened. This, in conjunction with officers implicit bias and systematic targeting of Black people through Americas criminal law, is what results in the tragedies we see on the news far too often. Dr. Deanna Cooke, the director of engaged learning for LMU's Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, explained, There's an overall context where Black and Brown people in particular are impacted disproportionately at every stage of the injustice system, right? So stopped more, arrested more disproportionately. Consider that Black people are nearly four times more likely than white people to get arrested for marijuana possession, despite having roughly the same rate of usage.

Elaborating on that systematic targeting, many of our laws seem to be less oriented in preventing harm than they are about finding ways to feed the prison industrial complex. Those laws tend to impact minority groups most, because they prey on circumstances exacerbated by poverty. In America, poverty and race are intertwined through a long tapestry of economic injustice.

Dr. Borges highlighted that problem, asking, How is it possible that, in many cases, drug use is criminalized, but no support is provided for people who have drug addictions? ... How is it possible that sex work is criminalized when a lot of people engage in sex work because that's the only way that they have to make enough money to survive in such a capitalist, oppressive system? People are criminalized for migrating for searching for livable homes.

Despite the consensus among well-intentioned people that the criminal justice system is broken, abolition is still hard for many to imagine since the police state has always existed in this country. However, Dr. Cooke described ways to create opportunities for minority communities that could help obviate the need for policing in the first place. Incentivizing the development of entrepreneurship in small businesses that employ a majority of people, thinking about what a minimum wage should look like so that it's a living wage, reducing the barriers for people who do have [criminal] records to getting jobs, making sure that our educational system is really responding to the needs of our young people making sure that folks have access to mental health services and social services. she explained.

Finding solutions to societal problems is more effective than shoving people affected by those problems behind metal bars, or murdering them in cold blood. Its time to address these issues head on, from economic inequality to social justice, to make policing unnecessary to begin with.

Unprecedented societal changes like abolition may sound radical and absurd, but nothing is more absurd that our institutions blatant and systemic disregard for Black lives.

This is the opinion of Anish Mohanty, a sophomore applied information management systems major from Union City, California. Tweet comments @LALoyolan or email editor@theloyolan.com.

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Making the case for abolition of the police state - Los Angeles Loyolan

When I first started going to protests against police brutality in 2019, I was in a grey area politically. Increased exposure to different perspectives and disturbing facts was rapidly pushing me left of my liberal comfort zone. I had always considered myself somewhat irreverent towards institutions like the police, and I was committed to the concept of justice. What changed for me at those protests, through conversations with my friends and back on the streets last summer, was my idea of what real justice should look like.

By January 2020, I was all for defunding the NYPD. Id seen cops brutalizing protestors, argued with officers who refused to tell me where my arrested friends were being held and gradually lost any illusions that the police were actually serving and protecting anyone. But the first time I heard it chanted by the massive crowd surrounding me, marching down the Brooklyn sidewalk at night, one phrase made me inexplicably uncomfortable: Abolish the Police. For most of my life, I couldnt visualize a safe, structured society without police. Now, I cant visualize a genuinely safe society with them.

Police unnecessarily arrest people and actively intimidate them. They occupy Black and Brown communities, and break the law with impunity. And they consistently protect each other from accountability and retribution. I could eulogize a countless number of people who died at the hands of police. There are those who are fresh in our memories, like Daunte Wright, Adam Toledo and MaKhia Bryant. And there are the people whose deaths sparked a global outcry, and rallied the Black Lives Matter movement: Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. There are the losses that are equally impossible to forget, like Tamir Rice, Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, because of how they devastated half the nation.

This list of names feels too long for a column, but its only a fragment of the full version. It will get longer; it wont stop growing until abolition has been achieved. I want to note that none of these people died for police reform or abolition, or for a cause of any kind. They lived their lives for as long as they could, and were murdered without warning. The overwhelming, drawn-out wave of violence, and the fact that it clearly targets marginalized communities, should be enough to warrant the abolition of the single, wildly destructive institution behind it. But out of nervousness, or greed, or both, many Americans have refused to consider abolition as a serious, practical response.

Instead of abolition, one popular response to the laundry list of tragedies is police reform. The issue with the reform rhetoric is that its vague. How do you reform unfiltered violence? Who gets justice when assailants are allowed to continue operating, with only a few surface-level changes? Reform isnt necessarily the enemy, but it also isnt a serious solution. American police officers kill people on sidewalks, in their cars, in their homes and in their backyards. They shoot innocent people in their sleep; they shoot people in the back, repeatedly. The level of brutality and the systematic nature of it is impossible to reform.

Its become fairly common among the pro-reform crowd to call for more training for police officers. That sounds like something that should work. But the training itself is the problem. Officers are taught to literally shoot first and ask questions later. Their training revolves around a simple concept: Hesitation kills. With that in mind, its not difficult to imagine why so many Black and Brown Americans are murdered by cops each year. Structural racism seeps into every persons brain, and unless we actively fight against it, it begins to define feelings and behavior. Police are taught to shoot the second they feel intimidated and, consciously or subconsciously, Black people intimidate them even when they are unarmed, or underage. Racial bias training has been implemented, but clearly racism and violence from cops hasnt slowed as a result.

The rot goes deeper still. Targeting Black and Brown communities is generally understood to be part of American policing. Cops have even been explicitly told to arrest members of these demographics by their superiors. Well never know how many times this has actually happened. New Yorkers know that defunding the police, while better than reforming them, isnt a meaningful solution either. Last summer, Mayor De Blasio committed to redirect $1 billion of the NYPDs $6 billion operating budget. The main impact was to transfer authority over the school safety program from the NYPD to the Department of Education, which had already been funding the program. Critics have since asserted that the move was highly performative, and the actual financial toll on the police department was negligible. This month, the NYPD is spending a fraction of their budget on robot dogs, which cost about $74,000 each to make, cementing the impression that they arent particularly pressed for funding.

One more phrase that sometimes pops up in direct response to demands for abolition, is the call to reimagine police. That shares the frustratingly vague, light-handed character of reform. But depending on how you interpret it, reimagining might actually be the right idea. Because if we start to imagine a world where communities are strong, where no one is handed a gun and trained to shoot first, and where implicit bias doesnt translate to murder with impunity, well be left with a world where police abolition has already taken place.

Grace Goldstein 24 is a columnist at the Collegian. She is an undeclared major, from New York, N.Y. You can contact her at goldstein4@kenyon.edu.

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Police reform is not enough. We need to abolish the institution. The Kenyon Collegian - Kenyon Collegian

The Minister of Labour Janez Cigler Kralj recalled that on 28 April we marked World Safety and Health at Work Day and that on Saturday we celebrate 1 May, Labour Day, so he thanked all citizens for following all measures and stated that by acting responsibly we will build a better tomorrow together. Today, perhaps more than ever, health and safety at work are extremely important, the minister stressed and, during the corona period in particular, the ministry is closely monitoring the situation on the labour market and trying to respond to current events as quickly as possible.

According to the Slovenian Employment Service, on 26 April 79,462 people were registered as looking for work, which is 4% less than at the end of March 2021, when 86,638 people were registered as unemployed. After three months of growth, i.e. November and December 2020 and January 2021, the number of unemployed started to fall in February. In March, the number of jobseekers continued to decline and the number of people in work increased. In additional to seasonal factors, this is associated with the gradual easing of restrictions. At the end of March, the number of registered unemployed stood at 82,638, 6.1% less than in February and 6.1% more than in March 2020. The figures certainly fill us with optimism that the measures are the right ones, the Minister added.

Regarding the situation with infections in homes for the elderly, the Minister pointed out that the situation has calmed down significantly since vaccinations began.

In the last week, 28 residents (a total of 11,396 in the second wave) and 14 employees a total of 4,637 in the second wave) were newly infected in homes for the elderly. The number of deaths also remains low. The vast majority of infected residents feel well and have only mild symptoms or none at all.

Minister Cigler Kralj went on to say that upon the 30th anniversary of Slovenias independence he wanted the government to appropriately compensate the victims of military aggression in the Republic of Slovenia in 1991, so at its regular session this week, it approved amendments to three laws and proposed that the National Assembly consider them by summary procedure, namely:

The proposal of an Act amending the War Invalids Act, the purpose of which is to enable the exercise of status and rights based on impairment of health due to illness or exacerbation of an illness acquired during military aggression against the Republic of Slovenia in 1991. The amendment to the law sets a deadline for submitting a request for recognition of the status and rights of a military invalid or civilian war invalid on the basis of health damage due to illness or exacerbation of illness acquired due to military aggression against the Republic of Slovenia in 1991, and requests for the recognition of the rights of family members of those who died as a result of illness acquired in these circumstances. The deadline is 31 December 2021.

The proposal for an Act amending the Victims of War Violence Act, the purpose and aim of which is to ensure legal protection for persons who lost a parent, spouse, or descendant in 1991 due to military aggression against the Republic of Slovenia. Legal protection will also be provided to family members of civilians who lost their lives due to military aggression. The amendment recognises the status of a victim of war violence to family members of a person who died, was killed or went missing as a result of acts of violence or coercive measures of the Yugoslav Peoples Army or internal affairs bodies of the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia between 25 May and 18 October 1991. The period also includes the Pekre Events in Maribor, and other examples of violent acts that resulted in the loss of life.

The proposal for an Act amending the Act on the Special Rights of Victims of the War for Slovenia in 1991, the purpose and aim of which is to enable children as newly appointed beneficiaries and spouses or common-law partners of victims and parents to exercise their right to compensation. The law defines special rights, such as a lifetime monthly annuity, compensation under a special law governing war reparations, a scholarship, priority in admission to a student dormitory and the right to have the costs of school lunches covered. Following the proposed amendment, the right to compensation is extended to children and additionally recognised to spouses and common-law partners of the victims and parents. The State has already paid compensation to some beneficiaries due to the death of a father, spouse or common-law partner, but not children who lost their lives due to the events related to the military aggression against the Republic of Slovenia in 1991.

Almost 30 years since the events related to the war for Slovenia in 1991, it is high time that all children who suffered damage due to the loss of a parent be granted flat-rate compensation. It is therefore proposed to amend the law by adding a new right to flat-rate compensation which will be granted to all children regardless of their age at the time the parent died. The bill takes into account the fact that, due to the distance of some events, some relatives of those who lost their lives in the war for Slovenia in 1991 have already died, so it gives the new right to flat-rate compensation under this law to their descendants of the first order, in accordance with the regulations governing inheritance. In accordance with the Act on the Special Rights of the Victims in the War for Slovenia of 1991 (ZPPZV91), the spouses and common-law partners of victims and the parents were entitled to compensation under a special law.

Dr Beovi pointed out that so far in Slovenia, 1823% of people have been vaccinated with their first dose in the regions or 20% in Slovenia as a whole. International comparisons show that vaccination in Slovenia is very similar to that in the European Union. If we look at the proportions by country, we are somewhere around the middle.

She stressed that although complete vaccination is important for full protection, the first dose is important for limiting the circulation of the virus and protecting people as protection against infection is a good 70% after vaccination with the AstraZeneca vaccine and 80% after the mRNA vaccines. In addition, the first dose protects against severe illness; for example, the Pfizer vaccine by 74% and the AstraZeneca vaccine as much as 100%.

The priority groups for vaccination as considered in Slovenia have proved to be very sensible as we have almost completely stopped the disease among residents of homes for the elderly, individual outbreaks are due to the fact that the vaccine does not give 100% protection, which can be a problem for herd immunity as unvaccinated persons coming into contact with residents. In all cases of infection in residents, the course of the illness was very mild.

COVID-19 mortality has been significantly reduced, and excess mortality for this disease is no longer evident.

She drew attention to the sad fact that people in their 60s and 70s who should be vaccinated against COVID-19 are dying every day in Slovenia. The death of people due to COVID-19 cannot be understood and is not necessary nowadays, pointed out Dr Beovi, because everyone could protect themselves in time by getting vaccinated if they wanted to. The side effects of COVID-19 vaccines can be unpleasant as well as dangerous. And even if they are really dangerous, they are particularly rare in the age groups most at risk from the disease. For people over the age of 50, there is no dilemma about getting vaccinated against COVID: vaccination should be arranged as soon as possible and the question of choosing which vaccine to have is completely unnecessary.

Referring to a report on inspections carried out in the last week, Deana Potza pointed out that a total of 3,608 inspections had been carried out, with the issuing of 20 misdemeanour sanctions, 312 warnings under the Misdemeanours Act and 212 administrative measures.

The highest number of non-compliant facilities or locations were in hospitality, namely 122, which represents a 26% non-compliance rate, and shops, where there were 116 non-compliant facilities, or 19%. The most measures were also imposed in these two areas, i.e. hospitality and retail. The reasons for the measures were mostly non-maintenance of social distancing measures, non-use of protective masks in indoor and outdoor premises, non-compliance with the conditions for conducting catering activities and the failure to provide disinfectants.

In the past week, there were 175 vaccination centre inspections, of which 163 were regular and 12 were extraordinary inspections on the basis of received notifications. This time, only one case of non-compliance was found, namely at the concessionaire within the Zdravstveni dom Izola (Izola Healthcare Centre) vaccination centre. The non-compliance was rectified immediately.

The inspectorate notes that the situation on the ground is improving. The organisation and implementation of vaccination is largely in accordance with the National Strategy; furthermore, additional vaccination centres are moving to actively inviting people for vaccination.

Toma Pejak pointed out that, in addition to their usual work and tasks, the Police are also supervising the implementation of the provision of ordinances governing individual measures to prevent the spread of the virus. In most cases, these are controls on measures to restrict public gathering and travel.

He stressed that the purpose of the police monitoring of compliance with the measures is to achieve the legally pursued goal of preventing the spread of the virus using the mildest means and measures and is always based on the principle of proportionality. Last but not least, the argument that police officers really are trying to apply the most lenient measures is reflected in the fact that the vast majority of proceedings and established violations almost 83% resulted in only a warning being issued, Mr Pejak pointed out.

Regarding the amendment to the Decree on determining the conditions for entry into the Republic of Slovenia due to the containment and control of the infectious disease COVID-19, which entered into force on Wednesday, 28 April 2021 and abolished checkpoints on the borders with Austria and Italy, he explained that, despite the abolition of checkpoints, the Police will continue to carry out periodic checks at road crossings at internal borders (where we have had checkpoints so far and also at other road crossings where only local people have been permitted to cross) and thus continue to check whether persons meet the condition for entry into the country without referral to quarantine at home under said decree and mitigation measures.

The Police still advise travellers to check for conditions for entry into the destination country and also the conditions for return before travelling abroad.

On the occasion of the upcoming Labour Day holiday, there is also advice for all cultural organisations, wind bands and others that perform vigilante parades to comply with the current provisions of the Decree temporarily banning the gathering of people to limit the spreading of COVID-19 that restrict the organisation of parades to 10 persons with social distancing. This does not apply in the case of close family members or members of the same household, subject to the restrictions and provisions of this decree.

The same restrictions on the number of participants apply at bonfires. As numerous smaller privately organised bonfires are expected to due to the impossibility of organising public bonfires, the Police politely recommend and advise people to pay attention to fire safety and ensure adequate space around fires to prevent them spreading to buildings and causing injury.

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Health and safety at work is extremely important in the corona period | GOV.SI - Gov.si

On Friday afternoon, civil rights activist and author DeRay Mckesson spoke on the future of policing as part of the Klau Center for Civil and Human Rights Building an Anti-Racist Vocabulary lecture series.

Mckesson, a 2007 graduate of Bowdoin College, worked as a sixth-grade teacher and school administrator before quitting his job in March 2015 to begin a career of political activism. Five months later, he and fellow activists launched Campaign Zero, a 10-point policy plan for ending police violence in the United States.Mckesson is also the host of the political podcast Pod Save the People and the author of On the Other Side of Freedom, a memoir detailing his experience as an organizer in Ferguson during the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Mckesson preceded the discussion with a simple clarification while many consider the fight for police reform to be a multi-generational struggle, he expects shorter-term success.

We believe that we can win in this lifetime, he said. I dont think Im working on a 700-year solution or a 500-year solution. We really do believe that with good organizing, we can win in this lifetime.

And Mckessons definition of win is a simple one. To him, in a country where police have killed more than 1,000 people a year since 2013, winning means no police killings, any and every year hence the Zero of Campaign Zero.

Although Mckesson and his fellow organizers are interested in broad, structural policy changes, they abide by a small-scale mantra: One is the biggest number.

When one is your sister, or one is your brother, or one is your mother or one is your cousin, you dont need 1000 One is enough, Mckesson said. There are some [aspects of our work] that will impact hundreds of people, there are some things that will impact thousands of people, there are some things that will impact 10 or 20 people and all of them matter.

Mckesson then went on to detail his approach to the reimagination of policing: a deconstruction of the logic of policing itself.

The logic of policing says there are people with power who set rules, policies and practices, and the enforcement is the logic of policing, he said. That enforcement is often violent and disproportionate toward people of color, poor people and it is harsh.

And although many organizers believe in only the complete eradication of this logic, Mckesson argued that efforts toward abolition can and should exist in conversation with efforts to change existing systems in small ways, using the topic of solitary confinement as an example.

The end of solitary confinement is not the end of incarceration. Does that mean that these two strategies are against each other? It doesnt, Mckesson said. One is an acknowledgement that we have a responsibility to real peoples lives today That does not take away from the demand, the urgency of undoing the carceral state.

In response to a question from Klau Center associate director Dory Mitros Durham about effective strategies for engendering policy changes, Mckesson noted the simple power of accessible information when 8 Cant Wait, an initiative of Campaign Zero, launched following the killing of George Floyd, the programs dissemination of public data resulted in surprising amounts of mobilization at the local level.

When we released 8 Cant Wait we did not fight police departments, we just made the data public and citizens fought police departments, Mckesson said. And thats why we keep everything public.

Mckesson also discussed how the mechanisms of change differ at local and federal levels. While policy proposals such as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act would result in some positive change, such as greatly reducing the legal use of neck restraints, the federal governments only means of impacting the policies of police departments is to threaten the withholding of funds, he explained.

The hard thing is that the federal government has never followed through on that threat to police departments, Mckesson said. So while Im interested in that aspect of the law, we just havent seen it enforced.

But one change the federal government President Biden in particular could make at any time, Mckesson noted, is the release of people detained in private facilities by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Federal agencies under the Department of Homeland Security are exempt from many acts targeting police reform, and Bidens recent executive order only aims to end the use of private prisons under the Department of Justice leaving private ICE facilities largely immune to both reform and abolition.

And Biden has the power tomorrow to stop that, with no trouble, Mckesson said. So those are the things we should be demanding of the federal government.Additionally, while Bidens aforementioned executive order is a step in the right direction, that order and others like it only solve a portion of the problem, Mckesson argued only about 8% of incarcerated people are held in private prisons.

In conclusion, Mckesson addressed a question on many Americans minds today: Now that citizens are armed with a wealth of information on systemic racism and corrupt policing, what are the next steps?

I think the moment you know your question, youll do your best work, he answered. I wake up every day saying How do we get to zero? And because I am chasing that question every day, it guides my work.

And that guiding question will look different for everyone, Mckesson noted.

For some people, that question will be about policing, or the carceral state or the climate, he said. When you know your question, the rest will just fall into place.

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'We believe that we can win in this lifetime:' Activist discusses 'reimagining policing' in lecture series - Observer Online