A recent political ad, sponsored by the conservative State Government Leadership Foundation, imagines the hellscape of a post-police Minneapolis. A terrified white woman jolts awake at 2 am during a home invasion. She alerts her husband. She grabs her phone. She calls the police. But its too late. They have all been defunded. A dispatcher informs her that a human resources specialist cant help her right now as the camera pans over her sleeping child, the burglar advancing ominously. Radical liberals are fighting for a police-free future, the narrator intones. Dont let them put your family in danger.

There is one thing and only one thing the ad gets right: On all sides, in all directions, the debate over the future of policing remains a debate over safety, driven by communities who desperately, deeply want to feel safe.

In the aftermath of George Floyds killing at the hands of police, virtually every faction in American politics from Trump Republicans to Biden Democrats, from Cato libertarians to intersectional Marxists says they want to change policing.

On one end of the spectrum stand abolitionists, who want to delegitimize the police. These activists demand an entirely new public safety system based on social and economic equity, bolstered by a network of nonviolent emergency responders. They are offering more than a different vision for public safety they are offering a different vision for the composition, and fundamental assumptions, of society. They have a different view of what causes crime. In the world they imagine, America would spend much more on education, health care, and infrastructure, and nothing on police departments as we currently know them.

On the other end stand reformers, who want to restore legitimacy to the police. This group seeks to implement procedural reforms to make officers more accountable and effective. They also, in general, want to spend more on policing. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Bidens plan, for instance, spends more on education and health care and infrastructure, but also more on policing: Hes proposed a $300 million increase to the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program.

Countless opinions dot the range between in particular, the defund the police movement (more on that in a moment). Much of the debate remains contentious, particularly on how best to defeat violent crime. Yet even amid consternation, bad faith, polarization, disagreement, and partisanship, a common refrain cuts across the parties: America relies too heavily on the police for unrelated services.

We need alternatives to policing, says Thenjiwe McHarris, an activist in the Movement for Black Lives and a police abolitionist. If someone is sleeping on a bench, if theres a mental health issue, policing is the one tactic often a failed tactic used in our communities for the range of needs our people have.

The reality is we have turned to police to handle a lot of problems in society that nobody else wanted to do to handle issues around substance abuse, to handle issues around the homeless, to handle issues around mental health, says Laurie Robinson, who chaired President Obamas Task Force on 21st Century Policing, which produced the basic agenda of the police reform movement. I think they would be very happy to hand off these responsibilities.

Likewise, former NYPD sergeant and Burlington Police Chief Brandon del Pozo asked: Why are we still asking the police as untrained interventionists to deal with people who are overdosing and using drugs or as barely trained crisis interventionists to deal with mental health when we can piggyback or create separate apparatuses that handle that for us?

This cross-coalitional interest in reassigning nonviolent services presents the most promising opportunity for ambitious change to a country rollicked by weeks, and years, of protest against racist policing. In an opening bid, abolitionists have suggested rerouting 50 percent of police budgets to other civil services.

But understanding the areas for compromise also requires seeing where the different visions conflict. So lets go through them in turn.

The police reform movement stands atop two premises. Good policing is good. Reams of research show it does, in fact, reduce violent crime. But bad policing is bad. Its bad on its own terms, because it harms the people it brutalizes, and its bad because it delegitimizes the police in the eyes of the community theyre meant to serve.

In Milwaukee, for instance, an important study showed that 911 calls fell after a publicized case of police brutality. The harm of bad policing, in other words, was both the police brutality and the severing of the relationship between the community and the public agency meant to keep them safe.

Police reformers, then, are trying to do two things at the same time: Make sure there are enough police to keep violent crime low, and make sure those police are both well-trained enough and tightly constrained enough not to abuse their power.

The Obama administrations Task Force on 21st Century Policing formed just after the 2014 uprising in Ferguson, Missouri, and published its report immediately after the 2015 Baltimore uprising. Its policy goals were a shift in policing culture, use of force, transparency, and fairness. As with universal pre-K, a $15 minimum wage, free community college, and a federal jobs program, the report articulated a progressive vision that was never fully achieved. Yet today, as establishment politicians respond to protesters calls for change, the task forces report still offers a window into how traditional reformers imagine a new American policing paradigm.

Among the reports 59 recommendations were that officers acknowledge the role of policing in past and present injustice and discrimination; avoid violence against children, elderly persons, pregnant women, people with physical and mental disabilities, limited English proficiency, and others; and adopt and enforce policies prohibiting profiling and discrimination based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, age, gender, gender identity/expression, sexual orientation, immigration status, disability, housing status, occupation, or language fluency.

The task force envisioned officers who are friendly, mentally well-adjusted, highly trained guardians. Through incentives, curriculums, and hiring programs, departments would create officers who prioritize deescalation and nonviolent intervention, abide by strict anti-discrimination laws, operate under strong transparency protocols, and stand accountable to local civilians.

Under this plan, police are not abolished; they are enlightened.

The authors also call for expanding the use of social workers and other nonviolent crisis specialists to supplement police officers. The report recommends reducing crime through a variety of programs that focus on public health, education, mental health, and other programs not traditionally part of the criminal justice system. This broader response to crime represents an area of overlap with the more progressive protests demanding alternatives to policing.

Robinson, the co-chair of the task force, says the ethos of the document has entered into the bloodstream of American policing. Citing a survey of 47 of the largest law enforcement agencies in the United States from 2015 to 2017 conducted by the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) and the National Police Foundation, Robinson notes that 39 percent of the departments updated their use of force policies and incorporated deescalation training. The survey also reported that officer-involved shootings during this period dropped by 21 percent.

While these data points highlight good news, Robinson also underscores that administrative barriers prevented the policy recommendations from becoming universal policing standards across the country.

We have a highly decentralized system, she says. We have 18,000 separate and very independent state and local law enforcement agencies that are operated and run by, in our case, many local independent mayors and city managers who are responsible for operating and overseeing those local departments. This fragmented bureaucracy clashing and the strength of police unions makes even the more modest reforms suggested in the policing task force more difficult to enact. But Robinson and Obama remains optimistic that the reports recommendations remain the right path forward.

We know there are specific evidence-based reforms that if we put [them] in place today would build trust, save lives, would not show an increase in crime, Obama said in a statement following George Floyds death. Those are included in the 21st-Century Policing Task Force report.

Thomas Abt, another Obama administration alum and author of Bleeding Out, a book on policing urban violence, said in principle he supports conversations around what roles police served and how they might be scaled back. Yet he remains worried about the tenor of the current defunding conversation.

I am supportive of asking these big questions about whether we can start winnowing down the police role. But you dont do that by just slashing police budgets, without a broader conversation about whos going to step up and fill the gap, Abt says.

I worry that people dont understand what it takes to set up a first responder operation. It took us well over a century to put together police, fire, EMT, he continues. To have a government service capable of responding in real time to these things is an enormous undertaking.

Abt and other more traditional reformers continued to see a central role for American police in society. Abt supports a mix of police reforms to increase transparency and curtail the use of force while also deploying surges of concentrated policing in the most violent neighborhoods.

But to the defunders and abolitionists, reform has been tried, and it has been found wanting. This year, the police department in Tucson, Arizona, was noted as progressive and reform-minded and had banned chokeholds and shooting at moving vehicles, embracing a range of measures aimed at reducing police violence, according to the New York Times. Yet local officers still killed Carlos Ingram-Lopez, a Latino man who was reportedly naked and experiencing a mental health crisis when he was killed, and withheld the video for months. Likewise, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which was celebrated for its progressive mayor, a former civil rights attorney, and their reform-minded police chief, city employees still killed George Floyd.

Citing reform failures, many activists want to go further.

Last month, the Washington Post published an article that cautioned that after a recession budget crunch, Vallejo, California, defunded its police department and officer killings shot up, while crime enforcement plummeted. Vallejos experience offers a glimpse of what a reduced police presence on Americas streets could mean as defunding continues to gain traction, the piece warned.

But austerity-driven disinvestment is not the future defunders want. (It also does not accurately represent the public policy vision that defund advocates are fighting for, as the Washington Post later clarified in the article.)

Part of the push here is that we know what we want to defund the other part about the demands for what we need, says defund advocate and Illinois state Sen. Robert Peters (D). Folks often get caught up in this oh, my god of demanding to defund the police. People need to know theres a whole host of other demands attached to that, which are about uplifting community.

In essence, defunding exists as a suite of public policy ideas premised on investments in individual well-being, community infrastructure, alternative first responder services, and divestment from the use of lethal force.

Defunders dont just emphasize expanding social programs and investments but also removing money from police departments. They argue that the swelling police budgets fuel violence and corruption.

Advocates like the Center for Popular Democracys Kumar Rao argue that police departments run on a broken financial feedback loop where, after poorly policing communities of color and running up huge legal fees for abuse, torture, and unjust killings, departments are rewarded with larger budgets the next year, funding a cycle of violence.

Part of the problem here is the amount of money that has gone toward policing over the last several decades, says Rao. Were now reaching a point where we spend over $100 billion every year on policing. That kind of spending on policing has entrenched an institution and has made it ultimately unaccountable.

For Rao, increasing police budgets increases the number of officers, which increases the scope of officers duties, which increases officers interactions with civilians, which increases opportunities for police violence.

Beyond issues of corruption, defunders also argue that reliance on police departments is poor execution of public policy because police specialize in violent crime, but violent crime only represents a small portion of the sprawling civil services they perform. They believe the money could be used more effectively elsewhere.

Take traffic, for example, where police spend nearly 20 percent of their time working in some cities. Experts like Transportation Alternatives deputy director Marco Conner DiAquoi argue that it is both safer and more efficient for cities to manage traffic through transportation infrastructure investments, automated enforcement, and specialized civilian first responders rather than through police.

Police officer-based enforcement is less effective than infrastructural alternatives, like street redesigns and automated enforcement, and puts people of color at risk, DiAquoi and co-authors write in The Case for Self-Enforcing Streets. The report, published in June by Transportation Alternatives, seeks to remedy the ways in which enforcement of traffic laws leads to discretionary and often biased policing of minorities.

In New York City, DiAquoi argues, many of the violations that are cited in minority neighborhoods are the natural upshot of poor infrastructure in segregated communities elements like a bike lane, quality sidewalks, or well-designed streets. DiAquoi and the other co-authors make a case for reallocating significant portions of the NYPDs budget to the Department of Transportation to increase investments in street design and automated enforcement to create self-enforcing streets which would reduce the ability of police officers to violate civil rights, cause property damage, or otherwise participate in sueable offenses.

Decriminalization illuminates another part of the vision behind defunding. Defunders like many others believe the war on drugs has been racist and ineffective, and we should simply end it. And if we end it, it makes sense for police budgets, which have grown in part because of the drug war, to be cut.

In Alex Vitales The End of Policing, the Brooklyn College sociologist explains how Portugal successfully decriminalized drug use in 1999; it handed over drug harm reduction to health officials, reaping very favorable results, with most drug use now treated as a health problem.

Studies have found significant reductions in heroin addiction, overdoses, and disease transmission, Vitale writes of the country. In 1999, Portugal had the highest rate of HIV infection among injecting drug users in the European Union; by 2009, the number of newly diagnosed HIV cases among drug users had decreased substantially. Likewise, reporting on Portugals decriminalization of drugs for the New York Times, journalist Nicholas Kristof found the number of heroin users there fell by three-quarters, and the overdose fatality rate was the lowest in Western Europe.

Meanwhile, after decades of policing, the United States was losing about 70,000 Americans a year from overdoses, Kristof continued. In effect, Portugal appeared to be winning the war on drugs by ending it.

Even scholars like Stanford Universitys Keith Humphreys, who has been skeptical of the methodology used in the Portugal research, note that similar results can be seen in the United States. Citing data from the Criminal Justice Statistics Center, Humphreys notes that after California lawmakers decriminalized marijuana, the state saw decreased interaction with the police. According to the study, marijuana possession arrests in California dropped by 86 percent after the law decriminalizing possession of small amounts of the drug. We dont need Portugal, says Humphreys. We, in the United States, have done these things. I think we could probably start moving on to what happened in California.

There was no evidence of substitution effect, either, he adds. Some people worry that the police will just find another reason to arrest the same person you know, get you for jaywalking or whatever. But that doesnt seem to have been the case.

Theres police time involved in making those arrests, Humphreys says. If youre going to cut the police force or defund them more, this might be a way to do it without doing any real damage to public health. At least for cannabis, people may use it a little more, but it doesnt seem to be they use a lot more than that. I think a lot of people would see that as a reasonable trade.

Crucially, Humphreys also argues that investing in health responses to drug abuse indirectly lowers interaction with the police, as users who successfully undergo treatment decrease the criminal and antisocial behaviors affiliated with narcotic use and trade.

Here, again, the case for defunding the police rests on the concept that it is more effective and efficient to shift responsibility away from officers and departments to civil service and care workers specifically trained to handle medical and logistical problems. Repeating this policy thought experiment across mental health, domestic counseling, homelessness, and more, defunders outline the playbook to move away from policing.

Many of these advocates still see a role for police officers, albeit a significantly diminished one. They view officers as a last resort, reserved for the most serious crimes, and for true emergencies as opposed to the roles they currently serve as default first responders. In this way, they differ from the abolitionists.

In interviews, advocates of defunding the police speak very favorably of abolitionists, and vice versa. In fact, in the short term, there is virtually no policy difference between many defunders and abolitionists. This symmetry can be seen in the recent vote by the Seattle City Council to cut the citys Police Department by 50 percent and reroute that money to social programs. This policy action, led in part by non-abolitionists elected officials, mirrors the policy recommendation of Mariame Kaba, the prison industrial complex abolitionist who recommended a 50 percent defund this summer in the New York Times.

That said, the long-term difference between those who want to defund and those who want to abolish is that the former believe police to be necessary in the case of true violence and extreme emergencies. Abolitionists dont; they ultimately call for alternative interventions, even for violent crimes.

In addition to all the critiques levied by defunders, abolitionists contend that the police remain an inherently racist institution, with its legacy stretching back to slave patrols, a history of supporting white supremacy groups like the Ku Klux Klan, and contemporary patterns of the racialized brutality on Black, brown, Indigenous, and vulnerable communities.

Abolitionists describe ending the police as an integral part of Americas third Reconstruction, where in addition to full citizenship and economic rights, Black people and all people will be free of wanton state violence at the hands of the police.

Police and prison abolition can be traced in the modern context to radical Black feminist and anti-capitalist thinkers like Angela Davis. In her 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete?, Davis pushed readers to question their acceptance of the carceral state, principally prisons, in American life.

In most circles prison abolition is simply unthinkable and implausible. Prison abolitionists are dismissed as utopians and idealists whose ideas are at best unrealistic and impracticable, and, at worst, mystifying and foolish, she wrote.

This is a measure of how difficult it is to envision a social order that does not rely on the threat of sequestering people in dreadful places designed to separate them from their communities and families, she continued. The prison is considered so natural that it is extremely hard to imagine life without it.

The same goes for police. Abolitionists envision ending both police and prisons as the next critical chapter in the Black freedom struggle following up on the end of slavery and Jim Crow. They believe that much of the crime that police officers respond to reflects broader conditions, disinvestments, and oppressions present across society, which are then used as justification for the policing and carceral states. Police, in this telling, mask deep societal sins, and only by removing them can we see the real work and transformation needed.

In the Boston Review, attorney and activist Derecka Purnell outlines what the road to police abolition might mean in broad strokes:

Police abolition could mean and require society to decrease and eliminate its reliance on policing. Rather than re-center police as a public good, the nation must become good and public. The prisonindustrial complex must be dissolved. Communities must rebuild labor organizing to shift capital, and the state must drastically disrupt rising wealth inequality. Congress may have to pass laws around prison labor, voting rights, gun ownership, and campaign finance, and decriminalize thousands of behaviors. Social workers and activists must work with communities to find solutions for patriarchal, homophobic, and mental healthbased violence. Police abolition advocates and scholars have robust visions for the future beyond transformation.

The vision is sweeping. Foundational to police abolition is what Purnell describes as eliminating reliance on policing. Kaba describes this idea as wanting not merely to close police departments but to make them obsolete. This is abolition as innovation. It is social engineering calling for a bold public policy action to address chronic social and economic issues and provide for basic human needs.

In this view, the primary aim centers on preventing criminogenic preconditions (joblessness, underinsurance, etc.) that lead to the violence for which people rely on the police. To the degree that violent crime persists even during and after these policies take effect, activists favor what they described as non-carceral interventions.

The Breathe Act, introduced by Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley, promotes programs that view violent crime as akin to a public health problem, requiring public health-style responses. Violence, in this view, spreads like a virus, and successful violence interruption programs rapidly deescalate neighborhood tensions following a shooting to stop the further transmission of violent retaliation. A recent memo from Data for Progress outlines the successful pilot programs using violence interruption to curb shootings in the neighborhoods with the highest levels of gun violence.

It summarized:

Repeated evaluations of Cure Violence have shown that it significantly reduces violence. In West Chicagos West Garfield Park, the program reduced shootings by 67% in its first year. A NIJ/ Northwestern University evaluation found that Cure Violence reduced shootings across Chicago by 41% to 73%. Other studies have also found that Cure Violence reduced shootings in cities like New York and Philadelphia.

Similarly, a 2017 UCLA analysis on violence interruption described the program as an effective way to curb violence by tasking civilian community interventions workers to mediate conflict and control rumors following a reported gang crime.

Our analyses of quasi-experimental interventions in Los Angeles indicates that civilian Community Intervention Workers, tasked by the Gang Reduction Youth Development program, cut gang retaliations by 45.3%, independently of the effects of policing, the authors wrote.

The Breathe Act leans on such non-policing alternatives to transition away from police solutions to crime. It also calls to expand Medicaid, implement a living wage, create targeted job programs for the long-term unemployed, and other economic justice initiatives.

You can tell a lot about a country based on how it allocates its resources. Were saying that now is a time when we target budget, local and federal where we say, divest from these institutions that have been harming us and invest in what our communities have always needed and will continue to need, says Thenjiwe McHarris, the abolitionist and Movement for Black Lives activist. We actually want to have access to safety. And what that means for us is a divestment from policing, and the institution of policing and an investment in what our communities need: quality housing, quality education, health services, particularly in the midst of a pandemic.

While abolitionists like McHarris have radical political aspirations, they remain committed to translating that vision into more immediate policy. Beyond the Breathe Act, abolition goals articulated in the Movement for Black Lives platform and in the more recent 8 to Abolition campaign outline first steps municipalities can take toward reducing, and eventually ending, the need for police.

Critics of police abolition remain skeptical about these activists ability to create alternative forms of care and emergency response to address violent crime. These traditional policymakers fear reducing the police force will result in spiking neighborhood violence. Since clearance rates and crime reporting in low-income communities of color remain abysmally low, abolition advocates often embrace a new policy framework.

Activists view the abolish mission as part of a multigenerational Black freedom struggle, and a radical tradition. Its a marathon, its not a sprint. Were inside of a particular opening. It was decades to get us here. Were all inside of multi-decade strategies, says McHarris.

Sharp, and even seemingly irreconcilable, differences exist in the competing visions of reform, defunding, and abolition. Yet the shortcomings of the American police system and American public policy more broadly stretch so wide that it creates a significant zone of overlap. Policing fails to address much of American inequality, dysfunction, and civil disorder. We have asked them to do too much, and we have neglected the investments and institutions that would make their presence less necessary.

More than half of police work addresses non-criminal issues according to an analysis of public records by the New York Times and an observational study in Criminal Justice Review. Likewise, policing scholars like NYU Laws Barry Friedman argue that crimefighting actually is a very small part of what police do every day.

Moreover, officers themselves often question the utility of using police for issues like mental health and homelessness. Im not even saying now that the budgets shouldnt be looked at, and seeing if theres another way to do that, Vince Champion of the International Brotherhood of Police Officers said on a recent episode of The Daily. Look, a lot of officers, were social workers. Were marriage counselors. Were doctors sometimes. Were more than actually what we were trained to be. I mean, we try to train for everything that we can, but we just cant be.

Then-President Barack Obama echoed a similar sentiment in his 2016 Dallas police speech, when he castigated America for underinvesting in schools, allowing poverty, underfunding drug treatment and mental health programs, not regulating guns, and then telling the police youre a social worker; youre the parent; youre the teacher; youre the drug counselor.

Converting common sense into consensus policy remains a daunting task for a country ailed by overlapping health and economic crises and diminishing political capacity.

This is a difficult debate on its own terms, happening at many levels simultaneously. Racial justice activists seek to address the problem at the scale at which it exists that is, on the scale of multigenerational theft, divestment, and discrimination. For many, this is too daunting to contemplate and too complicated to legislate. But it doesnt make it any less necessary.

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How police reform, defunding, and abolition overlap - Vox.com

The origin of the prejudice against a black complexion cannot be ancient. Krishna, the eighth incarnation of Vishnu, had a dark complexion and therefore is invariably portrayed in blue. Another version of Krishna, and a popular one, is Srinathji whose famous temple is situated at Nathdwara, north of the Chittor Fort in Rajasthan. Here, he is always portrayed in black. A few years ago, Prof SR Rao discovered the original city of Dwarka established by Krishna which had, in an earthquake, sunk to the bottom of the sea.

Most of the retrieved artefacts of Dwarka have been preserved at the Museum of Oceanography in Goa. Prof. Rao considered Krishna to be contemporaneous with the Harappan (Indus Valley) civilization. This means that the acceptance of dark complexion is not unduly old. Prejudice against the blacks in America began as recently as the 18th century when the slave trade from Africa began. Until then, it was not unusual to have black characters prominent in European literature.

The name of Othello, the hero of the Shakespearean great tragedy, is an example. The question arises whether such prejudices are related to power. In India, we have people of virtually all complexions and there is no social prejudice against any of them, although when choosing a bride there may well be a preference for the fair and lovely girl. This is all very surprising when one thinks of the four year bloody American Civil War fought between the northern Unionists and the southern Confederates.

While most white people on both sides of the divide reconciled themselves to the new post- Civil War unity, a fringe group of blacks could not march lockstep with the rest of the nation. Much earlier than the American Civil War, sincere efforts were made by several white leaders to either abolish slavery or make it less harsh. The slave trade was dominated by British slave traders. Yet, the leader of the Abolitionists was a gentleman from Hull, Yorkshire in England. He was William Wilberforce, a Cambridge graduate born of well-to-do parents and of liberal sentiment.

He leaned towards evangelism for quite a while in his life, and at other times, towards Methodism. It is possible that religious sentiments had their influence on Wilberforces views. He was a Member of Parliament for a good ten years. Wilberforce had another great advantage in the pursuit of his cause; he was friendly with William Pitt the Younger. Pitt became the Prime Minister, at the age of 24 and continued to remain the head of government continuously for 22 years. Essentially liberal in his outlook, Pitt supported, as far as politically possible, the cause of abolition of slavery.

The slaves thus had the sympathy and help of two powerful Englishmen. Yet, the vested interests must have been so deeprooted that the acquisition of slaves on the west coast of Africa, called the Horn of Africa, continued. It was not until passage of a Bill called the Slave Trade Act of 1807 by the British parliament that serious political steps began being taken towards ending this inhuman activity. For the practice of slavery to be abolished though, it took several more years, till the passage of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833, again by the British Parliament, which abolished slavery in large parts of the British Empire.

The 1833 Act was essentially an expansion of the jurisdiction of the Slave Trade Act of 1807. However, no matter what the British parliament did, vested interests located outside the British Isles continued with their profit-making. African slaves were captured inland by Arab slave traders and then handed over to British traders. The hapless Africans were then transported in ships that had very little space and no toilets. Imagine sailing across the Atlantic with no toilet at all in the hold. How suffocating and unhygienic such a voyage must have been.

Many of the slaves being so herded across the ocean died during the voyage, which also shows how cheaply they had been acquired. In other words, the traders who had got hold of them could afford to lose a substantial number. The accounts of these atrocities, both narrated and read, prompted any number of sympathisers to plead for the slaves. Their names included such distinguished individuals as William Ewart Gladstone ~ Prime Minister of Britain from 1868 to 1894 and others. However, the role of the American Civil War (1861-65) is seminal in ending the practice of slavery in the Western world.

It was a war that threatened to undo the United States of America itself. Had the USA not remained a single country after its Civil War, it is a matter of conjecture as to what the fate of Western civilization would have been. One thing is certain, though; a divided USA would have been a great threat to this civilization. Imagine what would have happened as a result of German aggression and imperial ambitions in Europe, resulting in both the World Wars, had there been no undivided USA to come to the aid of and preserve the liberal Western civilization.

What if there had been no USA to stand up to the (now deceased) Soviet Union, an equally dangerous foe? As an aside, my own familial experience with Africans might be instructive in bringing into focus how prejudices or preconceived notions might hamper mutual understanding among communities. One of my nieces is married into a Christian Nigerian family. Particularly, to show moral support and to demonstrate our lack of racial prejudice, my wife and I attended the wedding in New Jersey. I must say that I discovered to my surprise, the Nigerians were different; they were better educated and culturally more polished.

Since the family is Christian, the wedding was also held in a church. About one-third of the population follows Jesus Christ and is concentrated in the south-east of the country which is known as Biafra. According to their custom, speeches were made by relatives of the bride and bridegroom. Overall their side made better speeches and altogether appeared to be better, at least by Western standards. It has been a happy marriage, and their values appear to be like those of a joint family, not very different from an Indian one. The son-in-law was a F.R.C.S. from London, but this qualification was inadequate to practice in the USA; he was therefore, studying for another surgery course good enough for his new country.

Ten years later, the new surgeon heads three hospitals in the Pennsylvania and is flourishing as a medical star. The couple has produced three intelligent daughters who all wish to study at Ivy League universities like Harvard and Princeton. On balance, these West Africans appeared a lot superior to their East African cousins. The point I am making is how different the people in different parts of the world are than we presume. Incidentally, the Nigerians we met at the wedding were slim with trim figures even at comparatively advanced ages. The other niece is married into a family which hails from Jamaica and is settled in Canada, mostly around Toronto.

They are educated too, and earn their livelihood through professional work. They were well read and betrayed no complexes. We came to know about ten of them as they had dined with us in Delhi. What was remarkable was that they were quite indifferent to the colour of their skin. Two of the ladies were almost as white as Europeans, while two others were black. The men were of mixed colour, the kind that are described as mulatto in South Africa. In short, our observation was that they could not care less about their complexions. This in turn, was an indication that they bore no complex on this issue.

The marriage of my niece has been a happy one and their husband is quite a popular uncle amongst all our relatives. The couple has produced a boy and has adopted an attractive girl child from near Bhopal. What is striking about both these families is that they had no interest in talking about their problems, either racial or national. For example, the Jamaicans did not talk about their difficulties in their native country, which had been the reason for their migration to Canada.

Despite probing by me, none of the Nigerians seemed prepared to discuss the civil war of 1967 in their country between the southern Biafrans and the northern Nigerians, and its accompanying slaughter. Their uniform answer was that all that was a long time ago. For us Indians, there is a lesson to learn. When we go overseas, we should avoid discussing our communal, linguistic or casteist disputes with foreigners.

(The writer is an author, thinker and former Member of Parliament)

Link:

Origins of prejudice - The Statesman

Tai Carpenter is the current president of Dont Shoot Portland, a Black-led and community driven nonprofit known for its bystander intervention work and community advocacy. Carpenter served as Dont Shoots communications director before recently becoming president.

Portland State Vanguard: For how long have you been involved with Dont Shoot?

Carpenter: Well, Teressa Raitford is my mom, and she founded Dont Shoot in 2014. So Ive been helping out for a long time. I started by writing press releases and social media posts whenever we needed it. I was the communications director for the last year and a half, and about three weeks ago I became the president.

VG: Can you detail some of the key ways that Dont Shoot has been involved in mutual aid projects since the pandemic started?

Carpenter: We had to stop all of our programming in February and switched most of our work to an online format. But we started to use our space as a distribution space. So, people would come in before protests and we would help them load up their cars with snacks, first-aid kits and cases of water. We even had a couple of restaurants that started to reach out to us who have donated meals. So, we were able to get meals dropped off to people. We fed a lot of houseless camps and weve also done a lot of work with jail support during the protests. Mostly, our focus right now is helping people out at the Justice Center. I know a lot of people pull shifts down there, so weve been really good about making sure that people who need tarps, sleeping bags, meals or first-aid kits are helped out.

VG: I know Dont Shoots primary objective is disbanding [the Portland Police Bureau], but can you elaborate on what you think that should look like?

Carpenter: I know PPB pledged to slash its budget by a few million dollars, but I think thats just a drop in the bucket. We need to reimagine what public safety is and what it looks like, and that means slashing the budget and reallocating those resources to other social programs. You know, having specialized units to deal with people that are in crisis. Not everything needs to be dealt with by a bully with a gun. I think we need to put more focus on real community policing and taking care of our homeless communities, because theyre the ones dealing with the blunt end of all of this. You can see inequities on the street, you can see it in our city audits that they put out every year. The fact that PPB has such an obsession with murdering Black and brown people is sick and weve got to do something about it.

VG: When you talk about disbanding PPB, reallocating funds to social safety net programs and working towards real community policing solutions, do you think that there should still be a specialized armed force that is prepared to respond to violent crisis situations?

Carpenter: Absolutely. Im in no way advocating for the amnesty of violent criminals. Its just that [armed police officers] are the only force we have right now. I would love to know that if Im in danger or if people cant protect themselves that there is going to be a unit for that. I just dont think armed officers need to be the only unit.

VG: Polling from 538 shows that an average of 31% of Americans support police abolition while 58% oppose it. Those arent winning numbers. What kind of efforts do you think need to be made to garner widespread support for the cause? How do you go about changing peoples minds?

Carpenter: I dont know if its up to the activists. People have their demands and have spelled them out clearly, I just think people are afraid to actually take those steps. We have city leaders that are leaning towards reform, but no one will come out and say it. Thats the problem because I think too many people, including community partners, may be benefiting from having policing ties, and having these relationships with the police. Im actually surprised that 31% of people support police abolition, I thought the number would be a lot lower. I know abolition is a scary word, but a lot of people didnt want to abolish slavery. So, its not as scary as you think.

VG: On June 9, the judge in the lawsuit against PPB using tear gas granted the motion for a temporary restraining order against them using tear gas. The order was recently extended to last until July 24. I know tear gas is now regularly being used by federal law enforcement. Is Dont Shoot making any efforts to stop federal law enforcement from using these weapons?

Carpenter: The thing is, even though they extended the order through July 24, I feel like theres probably only been one night or two where tear gas hasnt been used at these protests. With Trump sending Homeland Security here, its been brutal. And so now theres a way for them to work around using munition and the tear gas. Theyve been trying to make it seem like PPB has been abiding by the ban, but now federal agents are using it so its gotten much worse. And yes, were currently working on [court] filings on this issue.

VG: Ive seen a lot of rhetoric by organizers online around calling for peaceful protesting being a red flag of sorts for the objectives of the movement. In fact, I saw a comment from Dont Shoot on Instagram that said, Peaceful protests are an exercise in #alllivesmatter co-opting. Can you elaborate on what you mean by this?

Carpenter: That was when an article was put out a few weeks ago where Black community leaders were interviewed and expressed their outrage at the protests. The piece was trying to create division among protesters. And I just thought it was funny because the people they quoted in the article had never actually been to a true Black Lives Matter protest. However you decide to protest is a protest. If youve ever been to a protest, you know its peaceful until the cops show up. Whenever I see someone crying for peaceful protests, thats trying to walk someone into a category instead of addressing the real violence that we all face from the police. It feels like the argument is being made in conjunction with the city to make the city look good. You cant tell people how to protest. You cant condemn one group for how they react to 400 years of oppression and then salute these other kids just because theyre behaving a certain way. I think that further divides the movement. You cant co-opt liberation. Were all angry, and whatever we decide to do is going to happen.

VG: There have been many instances where established Black leaders have called for peaceful protests. How do you strike the balance of critiquing these calls for peaceful protests while also not splintering the solidarity of your coalition?

Carpenter: I think we need to take a hard look at whose voices we elevate. There are plenty of people who are just now saying Black Lives Matter, including Black leaders in our community. Just because the media says theyre leaders or just because they were invited to Ted Wheelers barbecue doesnt mean they represent us. So, you should always respect and listen to Black voices. But you should also know and acknowledge their track records. And you need to know if thats someone that you feel comfortable speaking for you.

VG: There are, and have been, a variety of groups in town organizing protests right now, and there are protests occurring in various places at any given time in Portland. Going forward, do you think there needs to be a centralized voice that can unify these groups?

Carpenter: I feel like this is a process that cant be controlled. Its difficult to have a specific structure with all of this going on. I dont know if creating a central voice is going to ensure that everyones voices are heard. But I think the community has shown that it is dedicated to this. So, at this point the responsibility is on our local government to make these changes.

VG: In the past few weeks weve seen a lot of attention around the tragic deaths of Dominique Dunn and ShaiIndia Harris. Do you have any updates on how Dont Shoot is helping seek justice for those victims?

Carpenter: Weve been in touch with Dominiques family and we published a press release on that. And were trying to get in touch with the Harris family. You can find information on how to help those families on our social media accounts and our website.

VG: There seems to be a good deal of momentum around writing in Teressa Raiford for mayor in the upcoming election. After she lost in the primary, did she intend to pursue a write-in campaign?

Carpenter: After the primary, the plan was to take a break. But a few days later, George Floyd was murdered and we started to get contacted about a write-in campaign and how to make that happen. So, Teressa got on board with it and were excited. Outside of Dont Shoot, Im helping with the campaign a little bit. I feel really good about the momentum were seeing from people finally standing up. Right now, I think a lot of people are waking up. This is what democracy is about. Write-in campaigns are successful and people need to get this notion out of their minds that they have to choose between the lesser of two evils.

Dont Shoot Portland continues to do mutual aid work during the ongoing protests. They have an intake form on their website for anyone who has been harmed by law enforcement officials.

See the article here:

A conversation with the president of Don't Shoot Portland - Vanguard - Psuvanguard.com

In the minds of many, the United States of America is synonymous with its epithet the land of the free. That sentiment is difficult to square, however, with its statistics on prisons. The nation has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world with 655 inmates per 100,000 of the national population. Furthermore, 28 of its 50 states still enact the death penalty.

It is against this merciless backdrop that the award-winning writer and directorChinonye Chukwu, (currently working on the upcoming television adaptation of Chimamanda Ngozi AdichiesAmericanah, starringLupita NyongoandUzo Aduba),setsClemency,her latest feature film.

Its a bleak character study highlighting the dehumanising effect that a lifetime career in the correctional sector has on prison warden Bernadine Williams, played by Alfre Woodard. Years of carrying out death row executions have taken their toll; memories of a recently botched execution plague her daily and the emotional void in her marriage grows. As she prepares to execute another inmate, Bernadine must confront the psychological and emotional demons her job creates, ultimately connecting her to the man she is sanctioned to kill.

Having won a grand jury prize at Sundance last year, Clemency is only picking up momentum. ItsUK release coincides with forceful and unyielding calls to defund the highly militarised US police force which in turn were catalysed by the Black Lives Matteruprisings in response to the brutal murder of George Floyd at the hands of policeofficers.

I chatted toChukwu via Zoom she in LA, me in London about her thoughts on the indie film industry, racial tensions, prison abolition and mental health.

Wow, what a question. I was really excited to scope the prize, but I wish that I was the tenth or even the fiftieth person of my demographic to win the award, rather than the first. I wish that these milestones didnt still have to be broached.

Right now, we are really asking ourselves, what does justice look like? What does rehabilitation look like? And is that really feasible and possible given the current systems we have? One of the things that I think Clemency really interrogates is the function and the necessity of prisons and popular punishments specifically, but prisons and the social complex and the criminal legal system in the US [in general].

For me, I think we have to really reimagine what justice looks like, completely separate from what we have now. That means making society much more equitable and liveable. So, we need to dismantle the white supremacist capitalist systems that are embedded in criminal legal systems. Im not reform-minded at all, because I dont believe there is reforming a system that has its roots in enslavement.

I was inspired to make the film the morning after Troy Davis [an African-American man convicted of the 1989 murder of police officer Mark MacPhail in Georgia, US, whose death became a symbol of racial imbalance and the arguments against the death penalty] was executed in 2011.I spent four years researching for Clemency. I spoke with six different wardens, interviewed corrections officers, death row lawyers, lieutenants and a director of corrections about their experiences working in prisons and in death row facilities. I spoke with men currently on death row and one man who was exonerated from death row, after being incarcerated for 28 years for a crime he did not commit.

Im really good at emotionally compartmentalising. For years, I really just suppressed a part of myself emotionally in order to make the film because I had a job to do. There were definitely moments when I was researching, particularly when I was reading testimonies from men who were on death row, where I was literally in tears while I was writing.

Once I was done writing I just shut that part myself off and made the film. But there was one scene on set where I couldnt hold it together, the part where Anthony [Woods, an inmate who maintains his innocence] is alone in his cell. I was holding it together so well but then saw the scene play out in monitor. I just had to just let it out and sob for a while.

I made an intentional decision to not focus on what Anthony was convicted of, because I didnt want the audiences ability to see his humanity, to be contingent upon knowing whether hes innocent or guilty.

I think that as a society we tend to want to know what someone did to determine what we think about them, and that gets in the way of us really questioning and interrogating the system. And so I just wanted to take that away and really force audiences to grapple with his humanity.

Alfre Woodard and director Chinonye Chukwu discussing a scene on set.

Paul Sarkis

We dont see any psychological support for any of the characters in the film. Is this representative of the US system?

Yes, a lot of prisons dont have the psychological support. There are some prisons where a few wardens definitely provide, or try to provide some psychological support, but we dont see it a lot. I definitely didnt see it when I was teaching in prisons, and thats part of the dehumanisation process.

When I was writing the Bernadine character and talking it through with Alfre Woodard, who plays her, we both came to an understanding that for this character, her career comes first. Work defines her. She has worked in this particular prison system for so long, shes become numb to it. And she lives in that numbness.

Yes, and that just goes to show how this kind of systematic dehumanisation that is inherent in prison spaces, and specifically capital punishment, affects those who are tasked to oversee or carry out that dehumanisation. It cuts off a part of them as well, that allows them to be fully human and fully feel.

More states are questioning the economic feasibility of the death penalty, but I hope that through films such as this, the abolition movements continues to grow stronger.

Clemencyis released on Bohemia Media and Curzon Home Cinema streaming platforms from Friday 17 July

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Clemency Is The Must-Watch Movie Of Our Time - British Vogue

The U.S. today appears to be approaching a tipping point in dismantling its historical oppression of Black people specifically, the overt and racialized state-sanctioned violence perpetuated by carceral systems including the police. Decades of abolitionist and Black liberation movement efforts have brought us to this moment in which defunding police departments is not only happening, but also serving as a call to ask why we have police at all. From Frederick Douglass to Critical Resistance, abolition has always been about more than just ridding our society of slavery and carceral systems. Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba have taught many of us that prison-industrial complex abolition is not only about eliminating imprisonment, policing and surveillance, but about transforming our society, building different responses to harm, reinvesting and redistributing resources, and prefiguring the world we want to live in. A common question of abolitionist work is: What will be done about crime in a world with less or no police (and by extension less or no jails, prisons and surveillance)?

An increasingly popular idea has been to replace police with social workers, or to bring more social workers to work alongside the police. There is support in the social work profession for these ideas, including the National Association of Social Workers (NASW), the most prominent national professional organization, whose CEO recently spoke on MSNBC about the value of police social workers of which he said, They love us. They have our backs as social workers, and we have their backs, so its a very good partnership. The comments from NASWs leadership are reflective of a major dissonance within social work.

For clarity, we recognize social work to include all workers who identify with the field encompassing a wide range of commitments to social justice. From social service workers, to organizers, from clinicians to policy makers, from the noncredentialed to the most credentialed. Yet, the most powerful organizations, inclusive of NASW and the Council on Social Work Education, and individuals leading the profession of social work have often negated its organizing value of social justice in the pursuit of capital, professionalization and legitimacy.

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This has meant aligning social work with systems and structures of power, conceding much of its capacity to address deeply rooted oppression and racialized injustices. A key neoliberal manifestation of these concessions has been to locate the roots of social problems and crime in the individual. This harmful idea that society is endangered not by systems and institutions of the state but by individual behavior has been foundational to the prison-industrial complex and much of social work. It is then not surprising that social work is so readily accepted as a palatable alternative to police.

Uprisings and rebellions like the one happening now present us with an opportunity to reflect, and to stretch our imagination and behaviors so that our everyday practices, our relationships and our organizations can actualize the values we profess. This moment is asking all of social work, including our institutions like NASW, to reckon with our own history of being accomplices to state violence and to ask ourselves: What can liberatory abolitionist social work look like? And what kind of efforts in the social work community are already paving the way?

To transform social work, we must first reckon with how it is carried out now, as well as within the past. Social works reckoning must include confronting our complicity in colonization, in racial capitalism and the logics of neoliberalism, and in our relationship to the carceral state, all of which have become core to social work practice.

Suggesting that the answer to reducing the harm of police is to replace them with social workers misses three interconnected truths surfaced by abolitionist work.

The first is that ending police violence will require much more than changing the who and the how of responding to harmful behavior. Police violence is a window into the prison-industrial complex, which has required massive investments in the subjugation, criminalization and incarceration of Black people, Indigenous people and other marginalized communities, all the while divesting from their welfare and well-being. Any serious efforts to end police violence must not only transform our responses to harmful behavior, but must also include a massive redistribution of resources, and a reconfiguration of relationships and responsibilities. PIC abolition requires that we invest in the welfare of all people, starting with those at the margins, and that everyone has access to the essential human needs of our society including health care, housing, education and employment.

The second is that social workers have a long and troubled history as partners to the state, more often serving as carceral enforcers than as collaborators toward liberation. Mimi Kim has documented the history of social works reliance on law enforcement to address domestic violence and the many resulting harms on people at the margins. Dorothy Roberts, Don Lash and others have demonstrated how the child welfare system has served to criminalize and punish Black families and families of color. Most recently, Beth Richie and Kayla Martensen offered the term carceral services to identify social work services that replicate the control, surveillance and punishment of the prison nation.

The partnership with the state begins early on in social work education, where many students are trained via field education internships inside jails, prisons, probation and parole. However, as a 2013 study concluded, less than 5 percent of social work education offered courses with content related to the criminal legal system. And while we recognize the value of reducing harm within these institutions, the lack of education provided to social work students (among other social, economic and historical forces) often result in an acquiescence to structures of domination, and punitive and often racist ideologies.

Herein lies the foundation of cultivating an abolitionist social work. We must uproot these ideologies white supremacy, anti-Black racism, colonialism, cisheteropatriarchy that undergird the foundation of the U.S., guide the practices of carceral systems and permeate the ethos of social work. Like social work, police and prisons are relatively new social phenomena, yet they are all informed by unjust belief systems of human hierarchy, where Black people are perceived as inherently criminal, Indigenous people as disposable and LGBTQ people as a threat to the binaries that cement their relevance. A full examination of social works complicity in upholding these ideologies and atoning for the harm we have caused is a necessary step towards abolition social work.

Abolition social work is an evolving concept and we ourselves continue to grapple with what it is and isnt, as well as the potential it has for our current moment and for the future we want to build. At its best, social work will be the chorus for abolition partnering in the work of ending state violence, while supporting life affirming relationships, practices and organizations. While our code of ethics is by no means perfect, it nods in the direction of liberation by requiring social and political engagement to ensure that all people are able to meet their material needs and to achieve self-actualization. Building on our charter, abolition of the prison-industrial complex provides a framework and strategies to recalibrate what social work is and can be. And this will require that social work become unrecognizable from its current form. We can imagine a social work rooted in solidarity over charity, one that is decolonized, de-professionalized, anti-capitalist, and is committed to repair, accountability and continual transformation. Black feminist thought and organizing has taught us to create with intention, to build and imagine simultaneously, and to root our work in possibility.

As we grow abolitionist social work, discerning which efforts are more or less liberatory is not always self-evident, but its of critical importance. In our current moment, in which the defunding of police is already happening, we dont have the luxury to require perfect responses, but we can still move forward toward abolition. Dean Spade has helped many of us identify the difference between reformist reforms and liberatory reforms. We have adapted his questions slightly (with permission) to help us consider and discern liberatory social work efforts.

Many social workers are already engaged in building abolitionist work, giving us tangible examples of whats possible. Formations and organizations like Survived and Punished and Release Aging People in Prison are working to free people from prison while building power with those most affected. S.O.U.L. Sisters Leadership Collective mobilizes systems-involved girls and femmes of color Black, Brown and Indigenous to interrupt cycles of state violence, poverty and oppression. Creative Interventions has worked to stop interpersonal violence through transformative justice, building practices and guidance for responding to harm outside of the state. And even outside of social work, organizations like Movement for Family Power are working to end the foster systems policing and punishment of families and to create a world where the dignity and integrity of all families is valued and supported.

The road to actualizing abolition social work and the transformation of society will be arduous. But the blueprint is there. We must reckon with truth as we transform, and most importantly, we must dare to imagine, and co-create a world where every human being has the right to self-actualize and be free from harm. Social workers wont end police violence. Still, we believe in the possibility of a more liberatory social work that sees ending state violence as central to our practice.

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Trading Cops for Social Workers Isn't the Solution to Police Violence - Truthout

Protesters march outside a McDonalds in Detroit. The national workers strike, dubbed the Strike for Black Lives, saw people walk off the job on Monday in U.S. cities to protest systemic racism and economic inequality. Photo: Paul Sancya/AP/Shutterstock

For thousands, this Monday isnt a typical workday. In fact, it isnt a workday at all. Theyre on strike. Frontline workers in dozens of cities are participating in the Strike for Black Lives, which links racial and economic justice amid a catastrophic recession and protests over police brutality. Supported by a coalition of unions that includes the Service Employees International Union and the United Food and Commercial Workers union along with advocacy groups like the Poor Peoples Campaign, the strike has a simple premise: If Black lives truly matter, Black workers need unions, living wages, and health-care benefits they can actually use.

This strike is an expression of our members fierce belief that there is a reckoning in this country, both on unchecked corporate power that has caused too much poverty and on systemic racism that has caused the over-policing and criminalization of the Black community, Mary Kay Henry, the president of SEIU, told Intelligencer by phone.We see the strike as a way to unite with the Movement for Black Lives and all of the partners in this struggle for justice by using economic power to say we want to win justice on every front.

Workers, of course, have understood the connection between racial and economic justice for a long time. So have civil-rights leaders. When Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, he was there to rally support for striking Black sanitation workers. His Poor Peoples Campaign, lately revived by the Reverend William Barber and the Reverend Liz Theoharis, established racism as the axis around which a series of economic injustices revolves. But the events of this year take historical truths and project them wide-screen, filling our whole field of vision. The coronavirus kills Black and brown people at the highest rates. The recession the pandemic created saps wealth mostly from Black and brown households. And the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor illuminate the far reach of prejudice. The precise statistics change for each crisis, but the reality they convey is constant: Racism impoverishes and kills.

That fact affects every aspect of Lisa Elliotts life, including her work at a Detroit-area nursing home. Our managers dont even speak to us. Being a Black person and working in any nursing home during this time is very hard. Its very stressful, said Elliott, a certified nursing assistant and SEIU member who is participating in Mondays strike. Shes had panic attacks as shes worked through the pandemic, she explained, and the racism she experiences on the job contributes to her stress. Most workers in Elliotts facility are Black, and, according to her, managers ignore them when they ask for better COVID-19 prevention in the facility. Managers barely listen to them at all, in fact, and treat them mostly as the help. Rather than pick up for themselves, they even leave personal trash behind for the Black housekeepers to clean up.

When Black workers complain, Elliott added, the same managers call them insubordinate and the facilitys administrator is no help. To be honest with you, the administrator really thinks that all we do is lie. He thinks all Black people lie, she said. That unfair treatment filters down to the homes Black residents, she added. In the upstairs dementia unit, the Black residents dont get treated well at all, she said. White residents in the rehabilitation unit get hot meals and a variety of food. But the Black residents, they give them what they give them, she continued. The meals are often cold.

I support the strike 100 percent, Elliott said. And so do her co-workers. Were ready. Dietary department, housekeeping, laundry, activities. CNAs on all three shifts. We are ready.

The strike affords workers like Elliott a chance to demonstrate their might and then leverage it for better conditions on the job. But Mondays action has additional significance. It not only commands attention on behalf of Black workers; it undermines key conservative claims about the political ambitions of the working class, and it gestures toward new challenges for a changing labor movement.

Though Republicans, including Donald Trump, frequently insist they represent a silent majority of working Americans, that rhetoric has little in common with reality. The lowest-wage workers in the U.S. are overwhelmingly Black and brown. Theyre more likely than either whites or Asians to take jobs in blue-collar fields like transportation and service, and these days, the average construction worker is also more likely to be Latino than white. The work of child and elder care isnt just underpaid; it is also increasingly performed by women of color. Racism keeps their pay low, arrests their children, and sends ICE to their doorstep. Theres no way to lift up American workers without breaking down the racist institutions that keep them poor and vulnerable and that makes police brutality a working-class problem too. Mondays strike occurs amid ongoing protests over the police killings of Black people and follows a massive Juneteenth strike organized by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union in Los Angeles. McDonalds workers in Chicago went on strike the same day.

A lot of workers of color live in communities where they are also overpoliced, explained Missouri state representative Rasheen Aldridge, a former Fight for $15 organizer who entered the legislature in 2019. On top of making these low wages, which I call slave wages, you also have these same individuals that are constantly in oppression and constantly being pushed out, if not from their job then from law enforcement in their community. Over-policing can also happen at work. Elliott told Intelligencer that the administrator of her nursing home has a nephew in the local police department, a family connection he has allegedly exploited in order to punish his workforce. When staff parked in front of the home instead of in the back, per the administrators preference, he called the police. Everyone who parked in front of the home received a ticket.

Like Elliott, Aldridge knows intimately that Black workers fight a war for liberation on multiple fronts. Before he entered politics, he worked at Jimmy Johns, a national chain of sandwich restaurants. He was working hard, he told Intelligencer, but his pay was low. After Aldridge finished community college, his life took an unexpected detour: He got involved with the Fight for $15. A year later, Darren Wilson, a white cop, killed Michael Brown, a Black teenager, in Ferguson, not far from where Aldridge lived in St. Louis. Aldridge joined other Fight for $15 activists on the front lines of the ensuing protests. Mike Brown was killed right around the corner from a McDonalds where a lot of our organizing had been going on. It was one of our strongholds, he explained. This isnt the first time weve been stepping up for Black lives.

Six years have passed since the Ferguson protests, but the circumstances that produced them feel painfully familiar and provide the most immediate context for Mondays strike. While the formal demands of the Strike for Black Lives emphasize collective-bargaining rights and wages, unions invested in anti-racism have to address police brutality, too and that sets up a potentialfight within the labor movement itself. Protesters have demanded the defunding and even the abolition of police. Police unions, meanwhile, use the collective-bargaining process to enshrine broad immunity from oversight in their contracts.

A pointed statement from No Cop Unions, a coalition of rank-and-file union members in various trades, expressed support for the strike but called for labor to disavow law enforcement. Police, correctional officers, ICE agents, and Border Patrol agents must be expelled from the AFL-CIO and the broader labor movement, the statement read. We must divest from punitive institutions, such as policing and prisons, that serve the class interests of the rich and powerful. Several AFL-CIO affiliates, including the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union, have recently passed resolutions asking the federation to expel the International Union of Police Associations, and in June, the Seattle-area MLK Jr. County Labor Council voted to expel the Seattle Police Officers Guild.

So far, though, most labor leaders have adopted a more moderate tone, urging some reform but not expulsion. Henry, the SEIU president, is somewhat more critical. SEIU doesnt belong to the AFL-CIO, and on the phone with Intelligencer, Henry estimated that a little over half of SEIUs membership is Black, brown, or Asian, which places her in a somewhat unique position. Though she hasnt called for the expulsion of police unions from the labor movement, she told In These Times in June that the option to do so should remain on the table.

Were asking that our law-enforcement members commit to the principle that our unions, including police unions, are never used as a shield to protect abusive conduct, she explained to Intelligencer. I think we are at a moment of reckoning, which has helped catalyze a debate that reform isnt enough. Better training, body cameras, psychological testing are all good steps, but theyre insufficient to the demands being made by the movement.

For now, though, supporters see the strike as a positive, even necessary step toward broader change. I hope that it continues to uplift the message that not just the Black Lives Matter movement has been pushing but that the Fight for $15 and a Union have also been pushing, Aldridge said. Were talking about changes in policies when it comes to policing, but were also talking about change in policies at every level, not just the executive level and not just the local level. We need elected officials to understand. Were sick and tired of being sick and tired.

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Labor Flexes Its Muscles On Behalf Of Black Lives - New York Magazine

Five centuries of white supremacist terror: not just a past to which we are ineluctably fastened, but a present which produces us, albeit in differing orders of magnitude and vulnerability. The United States has long maintained the fiction that this country had molted its foundational violence, and yet, just as your skin sheds daily only to live dispersed atop your furniture and knick-knacks, so too does the grime of history make up the loam in which a person is destined to flourish, struggle, or wither. The work of Saidiya Hartman has charted a path in and through the social arrangements produced by the sedimented forces of accumulation and dispossession. Her writing, in numerous essays, and in such books as Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (1997), Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007),and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) has not only reshaped the contours of scholarly inquiry, but has given form to what she has called the as-yet-incomplete project of freedom. Below, Hartman speaks about the continuity of the Black radical tradition, the insurrectionary qualities of Black life, and the wild exercise of imagination required to challenge the reigning order.

WHAT CONSTITUTES RADICAL THOUGHT? How do we bring into view the constancy of Black radical practicea practice that has overwhelmingly fallen from viewand a certain lexicon of what constitutes the political, or the radical political, or an anarchist tradition, or a history of anti-fascism? In looking at the lives of young women, gender nonconforming and queer folk in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), one thing was absolutely clear: the practices of refusalshirking, idleness, and strikea critique of the state and what it could afford; and an understanding that the state is present primarily as a punishing force, a force for the brutal containment and violation and regulation and eradication of Black life. In Wayward Lives, I discuss the jump warrant, which enabled police to enter apartments at will. We know that Breonna Taylor was murdered in the contemporary equivalent of that jump warrant, which is the no knock warrant. The police just enter a place and do as they will.

Because the wayward are largely acting in and conceiving of the world in a way that exceeds the boundaries of the normthe legitimate, the respectabletraditional political actors and thinkers have failed to understand their actions as animated and inflected by the spirit of radical refusal. But to me, that was utterly clear. I would like to think of waywardness as prefigurative of todays protests and insurgency and also as a sustained practice. In Frederick Douglasss My Bondage, My Freedom, he describes the plantation as a nation within the nation, as a space of exception outside the embrace of democracy, as an enclosure. Black people have been abandoned by the law, positioned outside the nation, and excluded from the terms of the social contractand this recognition is in fact hundreds of years old. Wayward Lives gives young Black women credit for understanding this, for their acute understanding of relations of power, and the book attends to the ways they tried to live and sustain themselves, never forgetting the structure of enclosure that surrounded them, and the forces intent on conscripting them to servitude.

My work tries to think about the question, the open questionthe almost impossible questionof Black life in this context, and the ways to best convey the rich texture of existence in these circumstances: to render visible the brutal and abstract relations of power that make violent domination and premature death defining characteristics of Black life. How does one push against particular plots or impositions of the subject? Defy the script of managed and regulated life? Persist under the threat of death? One of the things that I love about W.E.B Du Boisand my work is in dialogue with and indebted to hisis his imaginative capacity and commitment to experimentation. To understand the epistemic revolution that takes place in Black Reconstruction (1935) is to understand the abolition of slavery and Reconstruction as the making of American democracy, and to conceive the radical and insurgent political practice of enslaved actors. Even C.L.R. James marvels at Du Boiss ability to conjure that revolutionary consciousness and reflects on his own shortcomings, in comparison, in Lectures on The Black Jacobins(1971).

There is always an open question of form: How does one bring a minor revolution into view? Most often we want to maintain a fiction that desire exists on one hand and violence and coercion on the other, and that these are radically distinct and opposed. We might instead think of sexual violence as a normative condition, not the exception. Under heteropatriarchy, violence and rape are the terms of order, the norm; they are to be expected. So how does one lust after or relate to or want or love another? How does one claim the capacity to touch when touch is, in so many instances, the modality of violence? As I say repeatedly, Wayward Lives is not a text of sexual liberation. But I really wanted to think about sensory experience and inhabiting the body in a way that is not exhausted by the condition of vulnerability and abuse. What does it meanfor those persons whose bodies are most often subjected to the will, desire, and violence of othersto imagine embodiment in a way thats not yoked to servitude or to violence? For me, this was essential to thinking about radical politics: What does it mean to love that body? To love the flesh in a world where it is not loved or regarded? To love Black female flesh. Breonna Taylors murderers have still not been charged.

The possessive investment in whiteness cant be rectified by learning how to be more antiracist. It requires a radical divestment in the project of whiteness and a redistribution of wealth and resources. It requires abolition, the abolition of the carceral world, the abolition of capitalism.

Incredible vulnerability to violence and to abuse is so definitive of the lives of Black femmes. And so, what does it mean to want to imagine and to experience something else? It cant but be politicalsimply to want to free ones body from its conscription to servitude, to no longer be made a servant in the reproductive project of the worldall of this is part of an abolitionist imaginary. We have been assigned a place in the racial capitalist order which is the bottom rung; the bottom rung is the place of the essential worker, the place where all the onerous reproductive labor occurs. Not just reproductive labor in the terms of maintaining and aiding white families so that they might survive and thrive, but the reproductive work that nurtures and supports the psychic life of whiteness: that shores up the inviolability, security, happiness and sovereignty of that master subject, of man. In large measure, this world is maintained by the disposability and the fungibility of Black and brown female lives. Intimacy is a critical feature of this coerced labor and of care. Black intimacy has been shaped by the anomalous social formation produced by slavery, by involuntary servitude, by capitalist extraction, and by antiblackness and yet exceeds these conditions. The intimate realm is an extension of the social worldit is inseparable from the social worldso to create other networks of love and affiliation, to nurture a promiscuous sociality vast enough to embrace strangers, is to be involved in the work of challenging and remaking the terms of sociality.

What we see now is a translation of Black suffering into white pedagogy. In this extreme moment, the casual violence that can result in a loss of lifea police officer literally killing a Black man with the weight of his knees on the others neckbecomes a flash point for a certain kind of white liberal conscience, like: Oh my god! Were living in a racist order! How can I find out more about this? That question is a symptom of the structure that produces Floyds death. Then theres the other set of demands: Educate me about the order in which we live. And its like: Oh, but youve been living in this order. Your security, your wealth, your good life, has depended on it. So, its crazy-making. The largest loss of Black property since the Great Depression was a consequence of the subprime mortgage crisis, and proliferating acts of racist state violence occurred under a Black president. The largest incarcerated population in the world; the election of 2016 and the publicly avowed embrace of white supremacy by 45all of these things we know, right? We know the racially exclusive character of white neighborhoods; how in urban centers upper-class people monopolize public resources to ensure their futures and their childrens futures over and against other children. Im a New Yorkerthe city has the most racially segregated school system in the country. The Obama and Clinton voters are invested in a school system that disadvantages Black and brown children and they resist even the smallest efforts to make it more equitable. The possessive investment in whiteness cant be rectified by learning how to be more antiracist. It requires a radical divestment in the project of whiteness and a redistribution of wealth and resources. It requires abolition, the abolition of the carceral world, the abolition of capitalism. What is required is a remaking of the social order, and nothing short of that is going to make a difference.

Everyone has issued a statementevery elite racist university and cultural institution, every predatory banking and investment companyhas issued a statement about being down with Black Lives Matter. Its beyond hypocrisy. Its utter cynicism. These institutions feel required to take part in this kind of performance and this kind of speech only because of the radically capacious demands of those in the street, those who are demanding abolition, and who have said: We are not a part of the social contract, we will riot, we will loot. These are legitimate political acts. These are ways of addressing the violence of that order at the level of the orderthe police precinct, the bank, the retailer, the corporate headquarters.

Theres a great disparity between whats being articulated by this radical feminist queer trans Black movement and the language of party politics, and the electoral choices, which are so incredibly impoverished theyre not choices at all. The demand to defund the police was taken up because theres been a movement unfolding for decades, an analysis that has been in placebuilding on the work of Angela Davis, Assata Shakur, The Combahee River Collective, Marsha P. Johnson, Audre Lorde, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi and Alicia Garza, Michelle Alexander, Keeanga Yamahtta Taylor. Its not a surprise that so many of the people in the street are young. Theyre in the streets with these powerful critical and conceptual tools, and theyre not satisfied with reform. They understand reform to be a modality of reproducing the machine, reproducing the ordersustaining it. I do feel that there is a clarity of vision that wont be lost. Thats what has been so inspiring about these protests and uprisingsthe clarity and the capaciousness of the vision.

As told to Catherine Damman

Read the original here:

Saidiya Hartman on insurgent histories and the abolitionist imaginary - Artforum

Over the last several months, Black Lives Matter protestors and activists have led the nation in an overdue reckoning, an excavation of how racism has permeated every aspect of American life: our schools, our policing, our workplaces, our justice system, our housing market, and more. For the young people in this movement, it's a new chapter in a lifelong fight, one that will shape the very world they'll grow up in.

But what does the country these teens envision look like? What would they say to themselves, 10 years from now, about this moment? Here, ELLE.com speaks to three Black Lives Matter activists across the country to ask just that: What would you say in a letter to your future self? What do you want to remember, and what changes do you hope to see? Below, what Thandiwe Abdullah, Anya Dillard, and Sophie Ming had to say.

Thandiwe Abdullah is the co-founder of Black Lives Matter Youth Vanguard and helped create the Black Lives Matter in Schools program, which was then adopted by the National Education Association. She says her biggest victory was helping to end random searches in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

When Black Lives Matter was founded, I think I was 10 years old. Being in those spaces and having access to all these amazing organizers kickstarted me in this work. It made me want to take it on for myself.

When I think about my future self, I hope that I'm staying in the community. I'm from the Crenshaw District, and we have a community that has been told that in order to be successful, you have to leave. That in order to be successful, you have to distance yourself from the hood, distance yourself from your people. That you have to be a capitalist. You have to be rich. You have to assimilate as much as you can into white supremacy and this white picket fence ideal. But personally, I don't agree with that. For me, success and my work should always be connected to the community. Making sure that I'm continuing to support and uplifteven if it's not my own peopleanyone who is oppressed, anyone who is in need or being subjugated. That's my job.

I want to remember that none of our wins came easy. Showing up at the mayor's office, at the DA's office, pressuring them, writing letters, going to the capitolall of this exhausting work just to get an inch of justice. It sounds corny, but don't give up.

Don't let activist work become something thats about fame, thats about money, thats about clout, thats about recognition. There's a difference between doing the work and subsequently receiving those things, but the way we're moving right now, we're in a dangerous place where people want to turn organizing and activist work into something thats profitable. It's easy to get lost in that, but you might end up forgetting the purpose of why you're doing this work in the first place. I would tell myself: Surround yourself with people who remind you of your duty and remind you why you're doing this work.

When it comes to the future of our country, I want to start from scratch. I want to see a world where folks don't have to worry about not affording basic human needs like food, shelter, education, medical care. I want a world where police arent militarized, where prisons don't essentially look like slavery, where we don't put profits over people. I want to see a redistribution of wealth. I want to see reparations. I want to see the abolition of I.C.E.

I'd want to see a culture shift, getting rid of the idea that in order to make it anywhere and be successful, you're on your own. I want everyone to care about other people. I want people to think that their own success and justice is tied to everyone around them. That's my world.

This June, Anya Dillard was part of a group of West Orange students who organized a Black Lives Matter protest for their community, drawing thousands of people and garnering the attention of their mayor and local officials. She's also the creator of The Next Gen Come Up, a non-profit organization encouraging community service and activism among teens.

George Floyds death emotionally jarred me. I was lucky enough to grow up in a generation that saw the first Black president, but I also live in a time where we constantly see people who look like our best friends, our brothers, our parents being killed every day. You get to a point where it becomes a harsh reality as a person of color. When I saw the video of George Floyd, I didn't feel the way I should've felt. It felt more like, "Oh my gosh, again?" The shock of it becoming so normal in my mind threw me into an emotional whirlwind. I had to shut everything off and reevaluate my purpose.

A lot of the time, people who are faced with the struggle move forward only seeing the struggle. That is the entire mechanism that keeps the system of racism going and keeps it alivethat people who are constantly beaten down are trained to believe that they can't move forward because of every obstacle the oppression builds in our path.

When I think about my future self, I hope I haven't gone through anything that has encouraged me to stop doing what I'm doing or to stop being resilient and unapologetic about starting uncomfortable dialogue. I hope that no matter how progressive the world becomes, I will always make sure that marginalized groups of people and their perspectives are brought to the forefront.

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I want to always be a "soldier of the people," to make a substantial difference in the width of the door of opportunity for people of color. I've always hoped that I grow up to be someone who builds a door where there is no door and advocates for people to accomplish the goals society tells them are impossible.

As for the future of our country, I sincerely hope that people start seeing others as human beings regardless of class, race, religion, gender, sexual orientation. People have mastered the art of dehumanizing those who are different than them. Everybody deserves respect, everybody deserves freedom, everybody deserves to be happy, to be successful, to obtain an education, to feel love.

I hope I remember what I've realized about my community. I've always grown up around people of every race, but Ive never seen so many young, Black kids come together to fight for something so important. It wasn't until the protests that I really felt connected to each and every Black kid in my school. That's changed how I, as a person of color, move through my own community. It helped me realize I am so much more connected to all of these people now because I recognize that we can all fall victim to the same system.

To my future self: Don't be so hard on yourself. I've always been a radical personality and passionate about the things that I believe. I often look back and think, Should I have been so serious? Should I have been so passionate about that?"

Dont question yourself. Feel free in being forward. Feel free in your creativity, your ambition. Dont dull yourself down for anybody. Move in your truth.

Most recently, Sophie Ming has organized both large protests in Manhattan as well as smaller gatherings to discuss topics directly affecting Black people. She is the founder of the New York City Youth Collective, which focuses on educating youth on issues related to the Black Lives Matter movement.

I hope my future self knows that everything I'm doing is much bigger than me. I do it now because I'm passionate about it, but it's for my children and their future children and their future children. It's about the Black friends and family that I have. And I hope that, in 10 years, I can look back at the work I'm doing now and appreciate that and understand that. I'm doing this because I love it, but it's also going to help so many more people that aren't me.

Gili Getz

I want to become a doctor. I want to become a physician working with kids and incorporate social justice into medicine. Racial segregation and racial disparities show up in every single field in this country, especially the medical field. One day, ideally, Id run my own hospital as a Black woman and hire more Black physicians and Black nurses and Black healthcare workers. We need more of them. We need people that understand Black health. A hundred years ago, I couldn't have become a Black doctor, and now I can. I want to bring my passion for social justice reform and racial justice reform into that field.

In the future, I hope the NYPD is defunded. I hope that I'm living in a world where I feel safer as a Black woman and my kids feel safer being Black and walking around Black. I hope Im someone whos still confident, who's curious, and always ready to learn new things.

I hope I remember to take breaks, especially when there's a lot of momentum in the Black Lives Matter movement. I'm fighting a fight that I was never meant to fight in the first place. It's not my responsibility to dismantle white supremacy. But I still do it because I'm with millions of other Black people across this country. Whether my future self is fighting for political reform or working in a hospital, I hope I remember to be present and allow myself to rest.

These responses have been edited and condensed for clarity.

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These Teen Black Lives Matter Activists Are Writing the Future - ELLE.com

*This post was updated on Monday, July 20, at 4:10 p.m.

The recent deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other Black individuals during encounters with law enforcement officers sparked protests and renewed calls for police reform in cities throughout the U.S.

Demands to "defund the police" have become part of mainstream discussions about police brutality, with people calling for new ways to protect and defend that don't involve the use of deadly force, especially in communities of color.

Supporters say reallocated funds could go toward improving and expanding social services, thereby relieving pressure on police officers to handle calls that do not immediately require violence.

I think that what I want people to understand is the police don't enact the law. They are trained to do and enforce the law that the government set, said Ron DeLord, attorney and founder of the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas.

This reimagining of public safety responsibilities also includes the demilitarization of police departments, updated deescalation practicies and implicit bias training, as well as funding towards services which address the root causes of many crimes poverty, mental illness and addiction.

DeLord said he believes the death of George Floyd has been a tipping point for the defund the police movement.

It's bigger than let's, you know, fire all the Minneapolis police and start over and change their name, he said. That's got the United States to stop and think about the systemic racism that's built into our criminal justice system. It falls so heavily on people of color in poor people in our justice system in our jails.

In June, the City of San Antonio held threelistening sessionsafter hundreds took to the streets for days on end to demand justice for victims of police brutality and advocate for change.

Other Texas cities including Houston and Austin started dialogues about policing amid the social upheaval. There's been some movement on the state level, as well. Will these conversations and proposals amount to real change?

Policy proposals include increasing accountability for officers and taking power back from unions; demilitarizing police departments and prioritizing deescalation over use-of-force tactics; making public safety budgeting a transparent and public process; community policing and more.

What does real police reform look like? What's the difference between abolition and reformation of police? What would San Antonio look like if SAPD was abolished?

How are police departments' budgets allocated and who is involved in the process? How much money usually goes to training officers and to measure improvement?

How integral are police unions to successfully reforming the status quo? What are the justifications for policies and tactics considered problematic by those advocating for change?

What services and departments are being proposed to work in conjunction with law enforcement? How would community policing work in practice? What is the public safety impact of these models?

How have other cities attempted to reform their police departments and what can we learn from the results? What policies are shown to improve police-community relations and reduce the risk of violence against people and communities of color?

Guests:

"The Source" is a live call-in program airing Mondays through Thursdays from 12-1 p.m. Leave a message before the program at(210) 615-8982. During the live show, call833-877-8255, emailthesource@tpr.org or tweet@TPRSource.

*This interview was recorded on Monday, July 20.

TPR was founded by and is supported by our community. If you value our commitment to the highest standards of responsible journalism and are able to do so, please consider making yourgift of support today.

Excerpt from:

Is It Time To Rethink Policing In America? - Texas Public Radio

In recognition of Emancipation Day, CBChas announceda series of specials this summer highlighting works by Black Canadians, including an encore presentation of the screen adaptation of the bestselling novelThe Book of Negroes.

Observed in Canada on Aug. 1, Emancipation Day commemorates the abolition of slavery across the British Empire.

The Book of Negroes, a six-part miniseries,will receive an encore broadcast as a three-night special event, Sunday, July 26 through Tuesday, July 28 at 8 p.m. (8:30 NT) on CBC TV and CBC Gem.

Based on the award-winning 2007 novel of the same name by Canadian writer Lawrence Hill,the story is a portrayal of the brutal realities of the slave trade told through one woman's life.

Aminata Diallo is kidnapped from her village in Niger and brought to South Carolina to work as a slave at the age of 11. After eventually winning her freedom, Diallo goes on to face decades of struggle and adversity, but later becomes a driving force in the abolitionist movement in Britain.

The Book of Negroeswon Canada Reads2009, championed by Canadian filmmaker and journalist Avi Lewis. Its French translation version, Aminata, also won the French-language showLe combat national des livres in 2013.

The Book of Negroesreceived the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize and the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize.

The miniseries originally premiered on CBC in January 2015 and went on to win 10 Canadian Screen Awards.

Leading into the first night of The Book of Negroes, CBC will also feature news and arts programming starting at 6:30 p.m. ET (7 NT) with CBC Arts: Exhibitionists Reflection and Resistance hosted by broadcaster and writer Amanda Parris, dedicated to Black artists who are trying to create in the midst of an uprising.

Starting at7 p.m. ET (7:30 NT) on the first night, investigative journalist Asha Tomlinson will present a special hour including theCBC News special, Being Black in Canada, with exclusive new interviews and insights with Hill and the creators and cast of the miniseries.

CBC will also launch a new website called Being Black in Canada, which features the stories and experiences of Black Canadians, on July 26.

The Being Black in Canada website will showcase profiles, opinion pieces, video, audio and a range of work from across the CBC, including news, documentaries and arts.

CBC Arts will partnerwith Torontoactress, writer, director and producer Ngozi Paul and Emancipation Arts to present FREE UP!, the annual youth-led celebration of Emancipation Day featuring music, theatre, spoken word and dance.

Also in the entertainment lineup is Emmy Award-winning documentary series, Jackie Robinson, which tells the story of famed baseball player Jack Roosevelt Robinson, the first African American to play in Major League Baseball in the modern era.

The series will air Aug. 2 and Aug. 3 at 8 p.m. ET (8:30 NT) on CBCTV and CBC Gem.

The Book of Negroes and Jackie Robinson are featured on the Black Stories Collection, a recently launched page on CBC Gem showcasing Black creators and stories from Canada and around the world.

Read the rest here:

CBC announces The Book of Negroes encore presentation and special programming to mark Emancipation Day - CBC.ca

Since the RCMP's earliest days, it has relied on Indigenous people for survival.

In the North, Canada's project of extending sovereignty over vast northern territories was made possible by the work of the RCMP and its Indigenous "special constables," who acted as guides and interpreters.

"Our special constables turned a lot of those RCMP members into men," said Gerry Kisoun, who joined the RCMP in 1971 as one of the last special constables, and served as a regular officer for more than 20 years.

But that shared history has not resulted in better treatment of Indigenous people.

In the North, critics say, members run out the clock on two-year stints isolated from the communities they serve, policing according to a model that has resulted in a large number of Indigenous people dying at their hands.

Increasingly, top officials, from the RCMP's commissioner to the prime minister, are recognizing the systemic racism that pervades the force.

Now, in the light of nationwide protests for police reform and abolition, pressure is mounting on the RCMP to devolve community safety to Indigenous communities, and reckon with their troubled history in the North.

"The policing [model] in the RCMP and the policing model in our Indigenous communities are diametrically opposed," said Gina Nagano, a Tr'ondk Hwch'in First Nation member who served with the RCMP from 1985 to 2006.

"Indigenous communities across Canada are waking up and saying ... 'We have a choice, and we're going to push back."

In the North, the RCMP has been both a source of pride and an agent of oppression.

As a child, Kisoun remembers hearing stories of RCMP officers' daring exploits on the land of the Mackenzie Delta, enabled by the work of the Indigenous guides who inspired him to first join the force. But he remembers darker stories too.

"Some of the other stories we heard was, you gotta listen to what the RCMP say, because they'll come into your house and scare the living daylights out of you," he said. "That if you don't send your kids to school, the RCMP are going to come along and throw you in jail."

Both Kisoun and Nagano said their own experience with the RCMP, growing up, was largely positive. RCMP officers were either locals, or well-integrated into the community, they said.

"We had great police officers in Dawson City that were posted there, and always participated in community events," said Nagano. "They were great role models."

But the view from inside the force was quite different.

"I grew up in a community where most of my friends were non-[Indigenous]," she said, "and I never really saw discrimination until I joined the RCMP."

"I was surprised to see it internally, and to have it that prevalent."

Nagano's experience was not unique. Margorie Hudson, an Ojibwe officer from Manitoba, has launched a class-action suit against the RCMP, alleging 31 years of discrimination by her colleagues.

Kisoun acknowledged he too experienced discrimination while on the job, but said "right now, that's neither here nor there."

But he did say the organization's history is a factor in the routine mistreatment of Indigenous officers and civilians.

"We're Indigenous, and we're going into something that was brought in by the Europeans," said Kisoun. "And sometimes, it's not an easy transition to go from where we are, to where they are.

"It takes a lot of work."

Both Kisoun and Nagano said that work is not any easier today, as the force has grown more disconnected from the northern communities it serves.

"The posting is two years," said Nagano. "It makes it really challenging for the RCMP officer to want to step out again and engage with the community."

"But vice-versa is, the citizens are seeing that all the time," she said. "They're seeing the change [and] inconsistency."

That affects trust, she said, and forces officers into "reactive policing" the kind of work where violent incidents are more common.

"If you break those barriers down, become part of the community, get to know the citizens. everything becomes proactive because the community wants to work with you."

Kisoun said it's not enough to have better community engagement at the end of the day, more northerners need to join the ranks.

"We have to have our own people involved as well," said Kisoun. "We have to see them out in those RCMP cruisers, doing the work in the community, keeping the peace."

Given several days, none of the northern RCMP detachments provided statistics on how many Indigenous people they employed.

To Nagano, the solution lies outside the RCMP. After leaving the force in 2006, she worked to establish Indigenous-run community safety programs at the Kwanlin Dn and Selkirk First Nations in Yukon.

The programs employ local First Nation members to conduct patrols and intervene in situations where police would normally be called. She said it made a big difference to interactions with police.

"Most of the time, when the community safety officers engaged with an individual, they knew who they were ahead of time," she explained. "They knew what family they belonged to, what clan they belonged to, and they had the ... understanding to approach it differently."

If someone requires intervention, she said, "we don't go to the probation officers. We go to grandma. We go to that elder in the community that will make that person accountable for their actions."

"It's not just a model for First Nations communities, it's a model that can work in any community. Who better to police the community than the citizens themselves?"

Nagano has a vision for rolling out this model across the country, but the barrier is a familiar one funding, and a lack of "political will" to make it happen.

"I think they see it as a threat," said Nagano. "They have already had something for 100 years. It's a challenge for them to see someone coming in with an alternative."

For his part, Kisoun is not holding his breath.

"There's lots of talk in regards to self-government and having your own policing," said Kisoun, "but that might take some time."

"As far as I'm concerned," he said, "I think that the RCMP will be here for a long, long, long time."

Excerpt from:

Former RCMP officers reflect on how to fix policing in the North - CBC.ca

Gerry Kisoun was one of the last special constables in the North, and served 20 years as a regular officer. He said RCMP officers need not be northerners, but must become part of the community. (Kate Kyle/CBC)Since the RCMPs earliest days, it has relied on Indigenous people for survival.

In the North, Canadas project of extending sovereignty over vast northern territories was made possible by the work of the RCMP and its Indigenous special constables, who acted as guides and interpreters.

Our special constables turned a lot of those RCMP members into men, said Gerry Kisoun, who joined the RCMP in 1971 as one of the last special constables, and served as a regular officer for more than 20 years.

But that shared history has not resulted in better treatment of Indigenous people.

In the North, critics say, members run out the clock on two-year stints isolated from the communities they serve, policing according to a model that has resulted in alarge number of Indigenous people dying at their hands.

Increasingly, top officials, fromthe RCMPs commissionertothe prime minister, are recognizing the systemic racism that pervades the force.

Now, in the light of nationwide protests for police reform and abolition, pressure is mounting on the RCMP to devolve community safety to Indigenous communities, and reckon with their troubled history in the North.

The policing [model] in the RCMP and the policing model in our Indigenous communities are diametrically opposed, said Gina Nagano, a Trondk Hwchin First Nation member who served with the RCMP from 1985 to 2006.

Indigenous communities across Canada are waking up and saying We have a choice, and were going to push back.Gina Nagano, former RCMP oficer

In the North, the RCMP has been both a source of pride and an agent of oppression.

As a child, Kisoun remembers hearing stories of RCMP officers daring exploits on the land of the Mackenzie Delta, enabled by the work of the Indigenous guides who inspired him to first join the force. But he remembers darker stories too.

Some of the other stories we heard was, you gotta listen to what the RCMP say, because theyll come into your house and scare the living daylights out of you, he said. That if you dont send your kids to school, the RCMP are going to come along and throw you in jail.

Both Kisoun and Nagano said their own experience with the RCMP, growing up, was largely positive. RCMP officers were either locals, or well-integrated into the community, they said.

We had great police officers in Dawson City that were posted there, and always participated in community events, said Nagano. They were great role models.

But the view from inside the force was quite different.

I grew up in a community where most of my friends were non-[Indigenous], and I never really saw discrimination until I joined the RCMP.Gina Nagano

I was surprised to see it internally, and to have it that prevalent.

Naganos experience was not unique. Margorie Hudson, an Ojibwe officer from Manitoba, haslaunched a class-action suit against the RCMP, alleging 31 years of discrimination by her colleagues.

Kisoun acknowledged he too experienced discrimination while on the job, but said right now, thats neither here nor there.

But he did say the organizations history is a factor in the routine mistreatment of Indigenous officers and civilians.

Were Indigenous, and were going into something that was brought in by the Europeans, said Kisoun. And sometimes, its not an easy transition to go from where we are, to where they are.

It takes a lot of work.

Both Kisoun and Nagano said that work is not any easier today, as the force has grown more disconnected from the northern communities it serves.

The posting is two years, said Nagano. It makes it really challenging for the RCMP officer to want to step out again and engage with the community.

But vice-versa is, the citizens are seeing that all the time, she said. Theyre seeing the change [and] inconsistency.

That affects trust, she said, and forces officers into reactive policing the kind of work where violent incidents are more common.

If you break those barriers down, become part of the community, get to know the citizens. everything becomes proactive because the community wants to work with you.

Kisoun said its not enough to have better community engagement at the end of the day, more northerners need to join the ranks.

We have to have our own people involved as well. We have to see them out in those RCMP cruisers, doing the work in the community, keeping the peace.Gerry Kisoun

Given several days, none of the northern RCMP detachments provided statistics on how many Indigenous people they employed.

To Nagano, the solution lies outside the RCMP. After leaving the force in 2006,she worked to establish Indigenous-run community safety programsat the Kwanlin Dn and Selkirk First Nations in Yukon.

The programs employ local First Nation members to conduct patrols and intervene in situations where police would normally be called. She said it made a big difference to interactions with police.

Most of the time, when the community safety officers engaged with an individual, they knew who they were ahead of time, she explained. They knew what family they belonged to, what clan they belonged to, and they had the understanding to approach it differently.

If someone requires intervention, she said, we dont go to the probation officers. We go to grandma. We go to that elder in the community that will make that person accountable for their actions.

Its not just a model for First Nations communities, its a model that can work in any community. Who better to police the community than the citizens themselves?Gina Nagano

Nagano has a vision for rolling out this model across the country, but the barrier is a familiar one funding, and a lack of political will to make it happen.

I think they see it as a threat, said Nagano. They have already had something for 100 years. Its a challenge for them to see someone coming in with an alternative.

For his part, Kisoun is not holding his breath.

Theres lots of talk in regards to self-government and having your own policing, said Kisoun, but that might take some time.

As far as Im concerned, he said, I think that the RCMP will be here for a long, long, long time.

Canada: Quebec Inuit org. calls lack of police, justice reform ticking catastrophe in modern times, Eye on the Arctic

Finland:Police response times up to an hour slower in Arctic Finland, Yle News

Sweden:Film exploring racism against Sami wins big at Swedish film awards, Radio Sweden

United States:Lack of village police leads to hiring cops with criminal records in Alaska: Anchorage Daily News, Alaska Public Media

See more here:

Former officers from Canadian police reflect on how to fix policing in the North - Eye on the Arctic

On June 25, 1950, North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel to invade the fledgling democratic south. Amidst changing borders, victories, and defeats, hundreds of thousands of Koreans from the North escaped to the South in the hopes of finding freedom. Two of these refugees were my grandfathers.

My maternal grandfather grew up in Pyongyang (the modern-day capital of North Korea), during its occupation by Imperial Japan. In his early years, he attended a high school founded by Christian missionaries. At the outbreak of the Korean War, my grandfather and his siblings were forced to flee, leaving their parents behind. During his perilous journey to the South, my maternal grandfather lost contact with his siblings, most of whom he never saw again. Near the end of his life, he was reunited with his sister, from whom he was separated for more than forty years. He was never reunited with any other members of his immediate family. When asked about why he escaped to the South, my grandfather would reply, I wanted to be free to worship God.

My paternal grandfather was an industrious man. Born in the Jeolla province during the Japanese occupation, he traveled to Manchuria to seek work and support his family. After working in manufacturing, he migrated to Russia, Japan, and, eventually, what is now North Korea. During this time, he taught himself to be proficient in Korean, Japanese, Russian, Chinese, and English. Just before the war broke out, he worked in a fertilizer factory in the city of Hamhung, which is still in operation today. Having heard that communist troops were approaching, he joined other refugees to escape to South Korea. When asked why he chose to escape, he said, The communists wanted to shut down factories and businesses. I want to live in a capitalist society.

Growing up, I heard my grandfathers escape stories from my parents and grandmothers. My maternal grandfather recounted one time when he was fleeing North Korean troops and heard a voice telling him, Leave the group! Come behind the bushes! Grabbing one of his family members, he ran behind the bush and hid, listening to the shrieks of innocent civilians being slaughtered by communist forces. Another time, my maternal grandfathers life was saved by the thick, family Bible he was carrying. Similar stories of violence and brutality are shared by other refugees, who said that communist soldiers would single out Christians and publicly humiliate, torture, and kill them. These experiences are captured in the 2010 South Korean film, One Step Forward. Even today, according to the non-profit group, OpenDoorsUSA, If North Korean Christians are discovered, they are deported to labor camps as political criminals or even killed on the spot.

The effects of the proletarian revolution were not limited to the Korean peninsula. Some of Karl Marxs stated goals for the socialist revolution outlined in The Communist Manifesto were to abolish property in land, abolish rights of inheritance, and confiscate the property of rebels or counter-revolutionaries. To realize this massive forced transfer of wealth, socialist revolutionaries often resorted to compulsory re-education and mass executions. In Maoist China, 200,000 to 800,000 farmers were systematically executed, while millions were sent to labor camps, according to Frederic Teiwess book Establishment of the New Regime. In Vietnam, 13,500 farmers were executed from 1954-1956. The number of those executed by the vanguard of the socialist revolution does not even include the 3.2 million people who starved to death during the Ukrainian famine, the 45 million people who died in the famines during Maos Great Leap Forward, and countless millions who perished due to the failure of socialist state policies.

Disturbingly, despite the plethora of historical examples of socialist brutality, similar behaviors and ideologies are emerging in Americas left. Many of our leaders, like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT), are calling for an unprecedented redistribution of wealth. Others, like media pundit Chris Cuomo, are justifying the immoral theft and anarchic destruction of private property in the name of racial justice. Meanwhile, minority business owners like Lucy Hosley, who worked their whole lives to honestly achieve the American Dream, bear the costs. This past Saturday, Lilith Sinclair, the leader of Portland Black Lives Matter, stated the group was organizing not only for the abolition of the militarized police state but also the abolition of the United States of America as we know it. These Marxists not only demand the abolition of the police whom minorities want to protect their communities, but also wish to erode the protection of private property, freedom of thought, and religious liberty. For centuries, these core values have motivated millions of people to come to America and gave them the security to innovate, work, and prosper.

It is not easy to succeed in a capitalist society. The experiences of my grandfathers demonstrate that, while difficult, achieving this success was possible through determination and ingenuity. After the Korean War, my maternal grandfather started a small business, as a craftsman and mechanic, manufacturing water valves and even making furniture for the Korea University Law School. He also served as an elder at YoungAhm Presbyterian Church. My paternal grandfather took on all sorts of jobs to ensure his family was taken care of. He owned a bicycle shop, made Western clothing as a tailor, and tended his land as a farmer. Neither of my grandfathers retired. Both of them worked hard each day, knowing that capitalism would allow their children and grandchildren to pursue greater ambitions.

There are clear challenges and problems our nation must deal with. And of course, we will have to work to ensure that all Americans have the opportunities to succeed. However, socialism is not the solution. Socialist revolutions have deprived millions of people of their basic freedoms and opportunities to succeed. Capitalism, on the other hand, has allowed me, the grandson of two war refugees, to immigrate to this country, attend Cornell University, and tell the story of two remarkable men who fled murderous oppression in pursuit of freedom.

Read this article:

My Family Escaped Socialism: Here's Why You Should Be Concerned - The Cornell Review

As people across North America protested police brutality and racism in late May, three nursing PhD candidates at Dalhousie University saw the need for nurses to take a stand.

So, Keisha Jefferies, Leah Carrier, andMartha Paynter came together to write a letter in early June. The letter called on nurses across the country to join the movement for police and prison abolition.

We feel its really necessary for our profession, if we are truly champions for public health, to confirm that by joining the movement, said Paynter in an interview Wednesday.

In the letter, the three friends highlight the ways in which police and prison are harmful.

In prisons, Black, Indigenous, and people of colour are disproportionately incarcerated and consequently bare what the letter refers to as the horror of prisons: isolation, restraints, infection, and injury.

To seek care while in prison requires compliance with traumatizing security protocols strip searching, observation, violations of confidentiality, the letter said.

The three colleagues believe nursing is a trusted and respected profession with a huge platform to advocate for communities experiencing harm.

Paynter said its also in the nature of nurses to intervene for the sake of their patients whether it was by administering medication or IV fluids.

What were saying is nurses need to adopt political interventions to change the course of social harm, she said.

The nurses also touched on the role of the police in the deaths of DAndre Campbell, who was shot by police in April in Ontario, and Regis Korchinski-Paquet, who fell from a Toronto balcony in May. The letter said the consequences of policing and prison challenge the efforts of nurses to provide care to their communities.

We will not have our work undone by police and prison systems, the letter reads.

The letter said any investment in reforming the police would be futile. Instead, governments should be investing in areas such as housing, education, and social assistance.

Why arent we deeply troubled by how the tables have turned to frankly dump money into policing, when policing does not work to eliminate harm? said Paynter.It actually creates not just harm but death in our communities.

Nurses are not the answer to the issue of policing, according to Paynter. But they can play a role in building public services that maintain the well-being of communities.

When these services are available, Paynter said policing and prisons would become unnecessary.

This is what she expects would happen if drugs were decriminalized.

Last week, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police released a statement to call on federal lawmakers to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of illegal drugs.

Paynter said the police shouldnt be championed for making the move this late. But if drugs were decriminalized nurses can help keep people safe by facilitating access to safe substances and providing all care thats associated with substance use.

While supporting community-based efforts to abolish policing is a priority for the three registered nurses, their letter also urges nurses in North America to start from within.

(We should) simultaneously be looking inward to see how our profession operates in a way that uses punishment and exclusion and discrimination in its operations, said Paynter.

Paynter gave an example for how nurses can be complicit in oppressing Black, Indigenous, and people of colour.

Nurses are taught to have really racist ideas about pain and policing access to pain relief based on those racist assumptions.

After releasing the letter in June, Paynter said about 1,000 people signed it. It was also translated into French, German, and Spanish.

But when she sent the letter to several nursing organizations across Nova Scotia and Canada, Paynter said she received no endorsements.

Our profession really struggles with divorcing itself from policing even though the evidence is clear that police brutality is one of the greatest infrastructures of systemic racism in this country, said Paynter.

She added that nursing organizations can start their fight against racism by increasing representation of Black, Indigenous and people of colour on their boards.

The letter Jefferies, Carrier, and Paynter wrote was published Wednesday in Public Health Nursing, a peer-reviewed journal.

Paynter said change is happening in policing and the nursing practice, but it needs to continue moving.

I envision nurses as really key leaders in a movement forward where police and prison do not exist.

Nebal Snan is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter, a positionfunded by the federal government.

RELATED:

Read the original post:

Why nurses are joining the call for policing and prison abolition - Cape Breton Post

Taipei, July 18 (CNA) An exhibit featuring artwork by inmates, some of whom are on death row, opened Saturday at Bopiliao Historic Block in Taipei.

Twenty-two calligraphy works and Chinese paintings produced by 15 inmates are being displayed at the exhibit, titled "Not Who We Were," organized by the Taiwan Alliance to End the Death Penalty (TAEDP).

TAEDP wants to change the public impression of inmates, which is usually fixed at the moment they committed their crime.

"What this exhibit wants to signify is everyone can change," Lin Hsin-yi (), executive director of TAEDP said during the simple opening ceremony.

"Maybe we can't say every death row convict has become a better person, but the possibility of change is always there," she said, urging the government and the public to consider alternatives to the death penalty.

Guests included Beatrice Latteier, deputy director of the Trade Office of Swiss Industries; Chiu I-ling (), secretary-general of Amnesty International Taiwan; and Chen Chun-hung (), director of the National Human Rights Museum (NHRM).

"No scientific evidence has been produced to date to prove that the death penalty acts as a greater deterrence to potential offenders than other severe punishments," Latteier said in her remarks.

While acknowledging that it is a long process for societies to come to see the death penalty as a violation of human rights, Latteier stressed that educational work, debates and relevant projects are important to raise such awareness.

The exhibit is the brainchild of Cheng Hsing-tse (), who spent 14 years on death row accused of killing a police officer in 2002. He was freed in 2017 after evidence showing his innocence was accepted by the high court.

Aside from artwork, the organizer also recreated in the exhibit site a mock prison cell for death row prisoners, which is usually only 4.5 square meters, with a video projection that shows the daily routine of a prisoner inside the cell.

The exhibit will run until July 26, before moving to Miaoli County from Aug. 1-9 and, Tainan City from Aug. 22 to Sept. 3.

According to data from Taiwan's Ministry of Justice, there are currently 38 death row prisoners awaiting execution, with the most recent execution carried out on April 1.

According to a survey released by National Chung Cheng University's department of criminology in February, 77.4 percent of respondents in Taiwan oppose the abolition of the death penalty.

Most other surveys in Taiwan also show popular support for keeping capital punishment as a way to provide justice for the victims and their families.

However, Lin told CNA that poll results vary depending on how survey questions are asked, citing research titled "For or against abolition of the death penalty: Evidence from Taiwan" by Chiu Hei-yuan (), a member of Taiwan's Academia Sinica, published in 2019.

(By Emerson Lim)

Enditem/AW

Read more:

Art exhibition featuring works by death row inmates opens in Taipei - Focus Taiwan News Channel

Over the last few weeks people in our town have been seriously asking themselves: What can I do myself to make things right, or better, between the races?

Over the last few weeks people in our town have been seriously asking themselves: What can I do myself to make things right, or better, between the races? Well, over a four-day period, an hour each day, a group of folks have met over Zoom to engage in a series initiated here in Oak Ridge, each seeking to find answers to that question. Here are just a few suggestions for personal actions:

Speak Up! Intervene when you hear people making wrong, hurtful comments especially related to race and race relations. Intervene with your family, neighbors, especially with people that you respect and who respect you in order to get the greatest result. People tend to listen to those with whom they have a close relationship. We all know the difference between right and wrong. If we dont nip it in the bud when we hear what we know to be wrong, we are, each of us, allowing the racism to continue to exist. This is a way that individuals can make changes without ever holding a sign, marching or publicly demonstrating One heart touching another heart, sending out waves of love and care.

Feet Under the Table. Some African Americans in this town have revealed they had never placed their feet under the dinner table in the home of a white person. Many white residents have never had a meal in the home of a black person either. We each can change this. The idea, very simply, is choose someone that you know from work or perhaps you have met at a community meeting from another race, with the goal of developing a close friendship with them. Correspond for now during the COVID-19 pandemic, and once you are able to, plan to have dinner in each others home. You have options even now use the phone, social media, even mail cards to your new friend to begin the relationship. As a start, simply ask how they and their family are doing.

Community Worship. For decades, the Sunday divide has worried some religious leaders. In 1963, during the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. told an audience at Western Michigan University that 11 a.m. on Sunday morning is "the most segregated hour in this nation" and he also called it a tragedy. Again, this is an idea for after the pandemic. But just consider the idea of setting aside even one day of the month, perhaps a Saturday or Sunday, for a day of community interfaith worship where those who wish can come together for prayer and maybe to break bread together. We all worship the same God we need to seek righteous solutions, together, under God. This would be a good way to break the cultural cycle.

The Golden Rule. We all know that mothers are the first educators of humanity. So, mothers, I suggest that you remember this and instill into your children the moral values they will need to contribute to the betterment of the world. We all have been taught some form of the Golden Rule. (See graphic.) Lets us all live by that, practice it daily, be an example, and teach it to our children.

Listen and Learn. White residents who say they genuinely want to learn, consider how to be a collaborator in whatever processes towards racial justice that are being generated. Dont instinctively take the lead, but listen, learn and offer to help wherever you can.

Our Common History. The earliest Europeans who came as colonists from the Netherlands, Spain, France and Great Britain were Puritans, Pilgrims, Protestants and Papists (Catholics). Most of the settlers to the New World were escaping religious persecution. Driven by religious motives, many of these church members were among abolitionists and anti-slavery advocates. Early newspapers and tracts promoting the abolition of slavery were published by devout church members.

The Underground Railroad was organized to aid enslaved peoples, often at grave risk to many of the religious men and women serving as conductors. Many of the 130 or so historically black colleges were founded and funded by white congregations.

As a people, we simply have not been taught an accurate and true account of our common history. So many who came to this New World actually started as collaborators when religion was part of everyday life, when this country promised equal treatment to all. While the understanding was not practiced at the time, the statement that says, We are all created equal is understandable. So, lets get back to basics! Listen, read, and learn from each other. Peacefully.

Patricia Alston is the public information officer for the Baha'is of Oak Ridge.

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Guest Column: Getting back to the basics - Oak Ridger

There was a rally outside the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse on Friday, which marked the 50th day of protests in Portland. One of the speakers at the event was Lilith Sinclair, a self-described "afro-indigenous non-binary local organizer." During her speech, she called for the abolition of the United States as we know it."

Sinclair, who is a Black Lives Matter supporter, told the crowd that she is not just "organizing for the abolition of the militarized police state," but also for the "abolition of the United States as we know it." The crowd cheered and applauded for Sinclair's proposal to tear down the United States.

Sinclair also said that Portland was "stolen land," and instructed the crowd to carry out a "land acknowledgment."

Sinclair labels herself as a "Black and Indigenous queer, non-binary femme sex worker." She also identifies as "AFAB," which stands for "assigned female at birth."

In an interview published last month, Sinclair talked about a "global uprising."

"I think it's apt that we are looking at a global uprising against oppressive structures during the month where we celebrate the anniversary of another uprisinganother movement to not just ask for but to demand our rights," Sinclair said.

Following the rally, the tensions flared. People were walking the streets with katanas. Rioters launched fireworks and set off smoke bombs near the Portland Police Bureau.

Vandals attempted to use fencing to barricade the Justice Center and the Internal Revenue Service building. Rioters threw projectiles, such as glass bottles, rocks, and broken pieces of metal from fencing, at Portland police officers.

The street preacher who was assaulted at the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle was also in Portland on Friday. The street preacher was allegedly punched in the face and carried away.

Portland has been in headlines this weekend, following videos of law enforcement officers taking away protesters during demonstrations. The mysterious officers are reportedly U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group and Customs and Border Protection's BORTAC. They were deployed to Portland since at least July 14 in an effort to protect federal property.

During clashes with rioters, federal law enforcement officers deployed tear gas on Friday night.

Oregon Governor Kate Brown (D) said, "Having federal troops here is like pouring gasoline on a fire," Portland-based KOIN-TV reported.

"This is appalling," Brown said. "When we need help from the federal government, testing supplies, personal protective equipment, they are missing in action."

On Monday, President Donald Trump commended the federal officers for their work in Portland.

"Portland was totally out of control, and they went in, and I guess we have many people right now in jail and we very much quelled it, and if it starts again, we'll quell it again very easily," Trump said. "It's not hard to do, if you know what you're doing."

Original post:

'Afro-indigenous non-binary local organizer' calls for the 'abolition of the United States as we know it' - TheBlaze

As people across North America protested police brutality and racism in late May, three nursing PhD candidates at Dalhousie University saw the need for nurses to take a stand.

So, Keisha Jefferies, Leah Carrier, andMartha Paynter came together to write a letter in early June. The letter called on nurses across the country to join the movement for police and prison abolition.

We feel its really necessary for our profession, if we are truly champions for public health, to confirm that by joining the movement, said Paynter in an interview Wednesday.

In the letter, the three friends highlight the ways in which police and prison are harmful.

In prisons, Black, Indigenous, and people of colour are disproportionately incarcerated and consequently bare what the letter refers to as the horror of prisons: isolation, restraints, infection, and injury.

To seek care while in prison requires compliance with traumatizing security protocols strip searching, observation, violations of confidentiality, the letter said.

The three colleagues believe nursing is a trusted and respected profession with a huge platform to advocate for communities experiencing harm.

Paynter said its also in the nature of nurses to intervene for the sake of their patients whether it was by administering medication or IV fluids.

What were saying is nurses need to adopt political interventions to change the course of social harm, she said.

The nurses also touched on the role of the police in the deaths of DAndre Campbell, who was shot by police in April in Ontario, and Regis Korchinski-Paquet, who fell from a Toronto balcony in May. The letter said the consequences of policing and prison challenge the efforts of nurses to provide care to their communities.

We will not have our work undone by police and prison systems, the letter reads.

The letter said any investment in reforming the police would be futile. Instead, governments should be investing in areas such as housing, education, and social assistance.

Why arent we deeply troubled by how the tables have turned to frankly dump money into policing, when policing does not work to eliminate harm? said Paynter.It actually creates not just harm but death in our communities.

Nurses are not the answer to the issue of policing, according to Paynter. But they can play a role in building public services that maintain the well-being of communities.

When these services are available, Paynter said policing and prisons would become unnecessary.

This is what she expects would happen if drugs were decriminalized.

Last week, the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police released a statement to call on federal lawmakers to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of illegal drugs.

Paynter said the police shouldnt be championed for making the move this late. But if drugs were decriminalized nurses can help keep people safe by facilitating access to safe substances and providing all care thats associated with substance use.

While supporting community-based efforts to abolish policing is a priority for the three registered nurses, their letter also urges nurses in North America to start from within.

(We should) simultaneously be looking inward to see how our profession operates in a way that uses punishment and exclusion and discrimination in its operations, said Paynter.

Paynter gave an example for how nurses can be complicit in oppressing Black, Indigenous, and people of colour.

Nurses are taught to have really racist ideas about pain and policing access to pain relief based on those racist assumptions.

After releasing the letter in June, Paynter said about 1,000 people signed it. It was also translated into French, German, and Spanish.

But when she sent the letter to several nursing organizations across Nova Scotia and Canada, Paynter said she received no endorsements.

Our profession really struggles with divorcing itself from policing even though the evidence is clear that police brutality is one of the greatest infrastructures of systemic racism in this country, said Paynter.

She added that nursing organizations can start their fight against racism by increasing representation of Black, Indigenous and people of colour on their boards.

The letter Jefferies, Carrier, and Paynter wrote was published Wednesday in Public Health Nursing, a peer-reviewed journal.

Paynter said change is happening in policing and the nursing practice, but it needs to continue moving.

I envision nurses as really key leaders in a movement forward where police and prison do not exist.

Nebal Snan is a Local Journalism Initiative reporter, a positionfunded by the federal government.

RELATED:

Read this article:

Why nurses are joining the call for policing and prison abolition - TheChronicleHerald.ca

Harry Potter author JK Rowling could fall foul of Scotlands proposed new hate crime legislation for expressing her views on trans issues, critics have warned.

Opponents of a broad extension of stirring up offences claim it is an assault on free speech and should be ditched from when the package is debated at Holyrood,

The proposed revamp of the law widens the offence from race matters to include age, religion, disability, sexual orientation and transgender issues.

Conviction carries a maximum sentence of up to seven years in jail.

Conservative MSP Murdo Fraser, a former lawyer, said his party will oppose the otherwise-uncontroversial and welcomed Hate Crime Bill very vigorously unless the Scottish Government drops that controversial element.

Inverness-born Mr Fraser, who represents Mid-Scotland and Fife, said the provision could impact on an individuals ability to voice what might be controversial or unpopular opinions and said recent examples, including JK Rowling and her recently expressed views on trans issues, could conceivably face prosecution under the legislation.

The view is shared by the director of the Scottish Newspaper Society, John McLellan, who said although it was not the intended purpose of the legislation, it could as a consequence put someone like JK Rowling in the dock.

Mr Fraser, who has led criticism of the Bill from within his party, said: You could create an offence by inadvertently stirring up hatred against a minority group.

To me the easiest way to understand this is to look at practical examples.

Probably the most obvious one recently has been the JK Rowling situation where she expresses a view around trans women and biological sex that causes a lot of upset to some trans rights activists who accuse her of promoting hatred.

I dont think her critics ever suggested that was her intention but under the bill as proposed there would be no need to prove intent, it would simply be sufficient to say that the consequence of somebodys actions was that they could be likely to stir up hatred against a protected group and of course trans people are a protected group.

Conceivably under this legislation, JK Rowling could face prosecution for expressing her views which are in line with biological fact and science.

The bestselling writer has been at the centre of a row about trans rights and has been accused of being transphobic, an allegation Rowling strongly denies.

In December last year, she voiced her support for a researcher who was sacked after tweeting that transgender people cannot change their biological sex.

Last month, Rowling also wrote a lengthy blog post on her reasons for talking about the issue, citing concerns around single-sex spaces.

Mr Fraser, who studied law at Aberdeen University, also used the example of Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris which faced a deadly attack in 2015 after it ran a series of satirical cartoons featuring the Prophet Muhammad, stating that running cartoons of this nature could quite conceivably be deemed as stirring up hatred against protected groups.

He added: If the government were prepared to remove part two of the Bill and the introduction of these new stirring up offences, I think the rest of the Bill is largely uncontroversial, unobjectionable and I think that would allow the Bill to go through pretty much as it is with with pretty widespread support.

But if the government is determined to keep the stirring up provisions in then certainly the Conservatives view is we will opposite it very vigorously and I know there are many other parliamentarians in other parties who have similar concerns and many of our external groups from the National Secular Society to the Christian Institute and a whole range of others, have expressed the view that they regard this as unacceptable and an attack on free speech.

The new powers would make it an offence for someone to behave in a threatening or abusive manner, or to communicate threatening or abusive material to another person where there is an intention or likelihood to stir up hatred in respect of the seven protected groups.

Concerns have been raised that individuals will be prosecuted if someone is offended by their words or controversial views but the Scottish Government says the marker of whether conduct is deemed threatening or abusive will be a matter for the courts, depending on the individual facts and circumstances of each case.

John McLellan, director of the Scottish Newspaper Society, the trade association representing the Scottish newspaper industry, said while the abolition of blasphemy is long overdue, the rest of the legislation poses considerable threats to freedom of expression.

Social media is awash with people bearing extreme grudges against those with whom they disagree and this legislation has the potential to give them a legal means to silence their opponents.

John McLellan, director of the Scottish Newspaper Society

Mr McLellan, said: In these times of increasingly bitter division over Brexit, Scottish independence and the environment, as well as gender politics, it is not too far-fetched to see the possibility of the police being drawn into political disputes because they would have to investigate complaints and be used as a tool to attack media organisations and close down debate.

It could be used by those who attackedJK Rowling for her views on gender to instigate a police investigation which could lead to conviction and its clear that plenty of her critics would like to see that happen.

It might not be the purpose of this legislation to put someone like JK Rowling in the dock, but that could easily be the consequence.

Social media is awash with people bearing extreme grudges against those with whom they disagree and this legislation has the potential to give them a legal means to silence their opponents.

A recent blog post by the Scottish Government defending the legislation on its website, said the bill does not seek to stifle criticism or rigorous debate in any way.

It added: It is important that people are free to express their views and opinions and the bill does not change that.

Other high profile opponents of the legislation include former deputy SNP leader Jim Sillars, who in a piece for The Spectator, said Scots are now locked in a woke chamber, adding that the act casts its net wide both in terms of who can claim to be a victim and who can be caught.

Meanwhile, one of Scotlands leading QCs Roddy Dunlop, who was recently appointed dean of the Faculty of Advocates, told The Times that changes to the hate crime laws threaten to criminalise comedians who tell the Scottish, Irishman and Englishman go to a pub joke.

He added: We worry it will be too wide and too much of a curb on freedom of expression.

The National Secular Society, a non-party-political organisation, who support secular cases in the courts and work to promote the separation of religion and state, believe the the legislation drafted is excessive, vague and seriously risks chilling free speech.

However, Justice Secretary Humza Yousaf has said he firmly believes the bill strikes the right balance between respecting freedom of speech and tackling hate speech.

He added that individuals can hold and express views on any topic and subject as long as these are not expressed in an abusive and threatening manner.

Read this article:

JK Rowling 'could end up in the dock' if new hate crime laws are passed, critics warn - Press and Journal

There was a rally outside the Mark O. Hatfield Courthouse on Friday, which marked the 50th day of protests in Portland. One of the speakers at the event was Lilith Sinclair, a self-described "afro-indigenous non-binary local organizer." During her speech, she called for the abolition of the United States as we know it."

Sinclair, who is a Black Lives Matter supporter, told the crowd that she is not just "organizing for the abolition of the militarized police state," but also for the "abolition of the United States as we know it." The crowd cheered and applauded for Sinclair's proposal to tear down the United States.

Sinclair also said that Portland was "stolen land," and instructed the crowd to carry out a "land acknowledgment."

Sinclair labels herself as a "Black and Indigenous queer, non-binary femme sex worker." She also identifies as "AFAB," which stands for "assigned female at birth."

In an interview published last month, Sinclair talked about a "global uprising."

"I think it's apt that we are looking at a global uprising against oppressive structures during the month where we celebrate the anniversary of another uprisinganother movement to not just ask for but to demand our rights," Sinclair said.

Following the rally, the tensions flared. People were walking the streets with katanas. Rioters launched fireworks and set off smoke bombs near the Portland Police Bureau.

Vandals attempted to use fencing to barricade the Justice Center and the Internal Revenue Service building. Rioters threw projectiles, such as glass bottles, rocks, and broken pieces of metal from fencing, at Portland police officers.

The street preacher who was assaulted at the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone in Seattle was also in Portland on Friday. The street preacher was allegedly punched in the face and carried away.

Portland has been in headlines this weekend, following videos of law enforcement officers taking away protesters during demonstrations. The mysterious officers are reportedly U.S. Marshals Special Operations Group and Customs and Border Protection's BORTAC. They were deployed to Portland since at least July 14 in an effort to protect federal property.

During clashes with rioters, federal law enforcement officers deployed tear gas on Friday night.

Oregon Governor Kate Brown (D) said, "Having federal troops here is like pouring gasoline on a fire," Portland-based KOIN-TV reported.

"This is appalling," Brown said. "When we need help from the federal government, testing supplies, personal protective equipment, they are missing in action."

On Monday, President Donald Trump commended the federal officers for their work in Portland.

"Portland was totally out of control, and they went in, and I guess we have many people right now in jail and we very much quelled it, and if it starts again, we'll quell it again very easily," Trump said. "It's not hard to do, if you know what you're doing."

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Portland protest organizer calls for abolition of United States - TheBlaze