Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

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

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

For a growing number of Scots, this must change.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See more here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continued here:

Power Over the Police - Dissent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMY GOODMAN: Explain that further.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[break]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

IMANI PERRY: Yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A series of questions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How do you feel when you see a police officer?

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

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

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

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

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

Who do the police protect and serve?

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

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

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

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

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

We could be hearing Keonte Furdge chanted in the streets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And that is the problem.

What can be done?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abolition as a process, not a quick fix

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image by Alex Rorison

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo by Alex Rorison

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

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

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

See the original post:

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

By Evan Blake 15 June 2020

As a result of statewide school closures during the COVID-19 pandemic, a staggering 779,000 K-12 public school educators lost their jobs throughout the US in the months of April and May. Over the same period, 239,000 public college professors and other employees and 424,000 educators at private K-12 schools and universities were laid off. The combined 1.44 million education-related job losses will in many cases be permanent and will have devastating repercussions for both educators and an entire generation of students.

These figures are based on the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) monthly unemployment surveys for April and May, which reported a combined loss of 1.1 million public and private K-12 and higher education jobs in April, and a further 340,000 education jobs lost in May. As dire as these figures are, there are reasons to believe that the BLS is doctoring jobless figures in the interests of the Trump administration, and that the real number of educator layoffs is even higher than reported.

In both months, the BLS acknowledged that there were errors in collecting data, which caused the agency to underestimate the true rate of unemployment by 5 percent in April and 3 percent in May. The reported decline in unemployment in May was seized upon by Trump to falsely claim that an economic recovery had begun.

The astonishing figures on education-related layoffs have largely gone unreported in the mainstream press, with only a handful of articles indicating the massive assault on both public and private education jobs over the past two months.

There is no specific breakdown of how the layoffs have affected each section of education workersincluding teachers, custodial staff, counselors, cafeteria workers, social workers, nurses, paraprofessionals and othersbut the bulk of the layoffs have likely not impacted teachers, whose contracts typically protect their jobs through the end of the school year. In all likelihood, districts significantly cut custodial and cafeteria staff, paraprofessionals and office staff when schools began closing en masse in mid-March due to the pandemic.

These sections of school workers, who are paid less than teachers and far less than administrators, typically have less savings and live from paycheck to paycheck. They are generally members of trade unions, primarily the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), while teachers are members of either the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) or the National Education Association (NEA). Not one of these organizations has lifted a finger to oppose the massive assault on jobs, continuing their decades-long complicity in the attack on public education.

Most school districts across the US have deadlines in March to give layoff notices to educators, which is an annual occurrence in many districts. For example, in March, Sacramento City Unified School District officially laid off 11 full-time teachers and 46.5 full-time equivalent classified positions, including bus drivers, clerks, campus monitors, yard duty employees and instructional aides. These cuts had been planned for some time. Since the pandemic, undoubtedly many more layoffs across the district have gone unreported, as they have across the US.

As the World Socialist Web Site has reported, numerous states across the US have announced major budget cuts planned for the end of the school year and in the coming months, indicating that even further job cuts are on the agenda. In New York City alone, $185 million in K-12 education cuts have been implemented for the current fiscal year, primarily from the central office, and an additional $642 million are being planned for the coming year.

Charity, a former substitute teacher in multiple districts in the Sacramento, California, metropolitan area, who was furloughed from her position in mid-March, told the World Socialist Web Site, Im not surprised, but I know that the students, families, furloughed and terminated workers and their communities will be negatively impacted. Many students were already lacking adequate food, housing, and mental health care.

She continued, I think educators, parents, workers coming together to combat the coming austerity is what is necessary to right this horrible wrong, and its lots of work, righteous work, but lots of work.

She added, I am a socialist. Capitalism will not address the needs of the populace because it is not structured to do so. It is meant to extract as much profit as is possible. I think of the ventilators needed to save lives recently from the current pandemic. States were bidding against one another for their residents. That is ridiculous. So too, our schools should be equipped to teach future generations to maintain and advance our society. Capitalism doesnt want to pay taxes of any kind to support precious institutionsschools, hospitals, people.

A paraprofessional in Brookline, Massachusetts, where over half the teaching staff have received pink slips and over 300 paraprofessionals are now threatened with layoffs, told the World Socialist Web Site, It is truly saddening to see and hear so many educators are being laid off around the country. In times like these we truly need more educators, not less. It is baffling as to why this is happening right now.

He said that the layoffs in Brookline are troubling to say the least. This not only affects my colleagues and myself, but the students and families in Brookline who we work with.

Commenting on the broader political situation, he noted, Capitalism has failed, plain and simple. I have yet to hear how capitalism has helped anyone but the top 1 percent and it is insane. I am on the side of humanity, and I see no way capitalism can truly benefit that.

The elimination of 779,000 K-12 public education jobs in April and May by far surpasses the estimated loss of education jobs in the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse, and the public school system never recovered from the previous wave of cost-cutting and job-cutting.

In September 2019, the number of local education jobs was 60,000 less than the same figure in September 2008, but given the 1,419,000 increase in enrollment over the intervening period, there was an estimated shortage of 300,000 education jobs at the start of this school year, a figure that has more than tripled in the past two months alone.

As a result of the legacy of austerity from the Great Recession, beginning in 2018 teachers and other educators initiated a powerful wave of strikes across the US. Since the wildcat strike of West Virginia teachers in February 2018, over 700,000 educators have gone on strike in over a dozen states, contributing to the largest upsurge of the class struggle in the US since 1986.

As indicated by the recent mass, multiracial demonstrations against police violence, there is a growing radicalization taking place among workers and youth, including many educators who have taken part in demonstrations. The militancy of educators at every point comes into conflict with the right-wing trade union apparatuses that have facilitated the mass layoffs and attacks on public schools.

The WSWS Educators Newsletter calls on educators to form independent rank-and-file committees at every school to begin organizing a systematic campaign against budget cuts and layoffs. The demand must be raised for full funding for education and all the social needs of the working class, to be paid for by heavy taxation of the rich and the reallocation of the trillions being funneled to Wall Street under the cover of the coronavirus pandemic.

In this struggle, educators can place no faith in the Democratic Party, which for decades has collaborated with the Republicans to destroy public education. In the CARES Act, which passed through Congress in two days with near-unanimous support from both parties, trillions of dollars were handed over to Wall Street, while states were left to starve and K-12 public education was allocated merely $13.5 billion.

The so-called HEROES Act passed by the House of Representatives, and touted as the solution to the states budget crises, is a fraud perpetrated by the Democrats and their allies in the trade unions, and has been declared dead on arrival by Trump and Senate Republicans. The act allocates merely $60 billion for K-12 public education while states face deficits of at least $230 billion in education funding through the coming school year.

Educators are acutely aware of the assault taking place on public education, which will only intensify in the coming months. When the WSWS broke the news May 30 about devastating cuts to public schools in Randolph, Massachusetts, the article went viral and has now been read nearly 700,000 times.

The silence on mass layoffs of educators imposed by the corporate media must be broken. We appeal to all educators to send us your stories, expose layoffs that have taken place or are being planned in your district, and subscribe to our newsletter to follow developments. Ultimately, the defense of public education is predicated on the abolition of capitalism, which subordinates all social needs to private profit. We urge the most class conscious educators to make the decision to join the Socialist Equality Party (SEP) today and take up the fight for socialism.

The author also recommends:

Massachusetts teacher denounces cuts to Randolph and Brookline schools [11 June 2020]

35,000 sign petition to provide full funding to Randolph schools in Massachusetts [9 June 2020]

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Continue reading here:

Over 1.4 million US education jobs slashed in April and May - World Socialist Web Site

This afternoon, Unlock the Box: The National Campaign To End Solitary Confinement released a report based on research and analysis by Solitary Watch. The press release for the report follows.

Washington, D.C.The Unlock the Box Campaign announced today the release of a new Special Report entitled Solitary Confinement Is Never the Answer, documenting the impacts and risks associated with the estimated 500 percent increase in the use of solitary confinement as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Special Report notes that the number of people held in solitary confinement in the United States ballooned to an estimated 300,000 people in April, as compared to an estimated 60,000 people held in solitary confinement each day prior to the outbreak.

Unlock the Box, a national campaign to end the use of solitary confinement, is issuing this report in response to the dramatic growth in the use of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, jails, and detention centers since the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on research and analysis by the national watchdog group Solitary Watch, the reports findings demonstrate the urgency for federal, state, and local officials to immediately reduce the number of people behind bars, where the coronavirus infection rate is three times higher than in the population at large, and to use safe and effective alternatives to solitary to prevent the spread of the virus among incarcerated people and correctional staff, as well as their communities.

The use of solitary confinement had been declining steadily in United States prisons and jails over the past decade following a 2011 United Nations Report naming the country a global outlier for its institutionalized use of the practice. The U.N.s Nelson Mandela Rules label prolonged solitary confinement of more than 15 days as a form of torture, and call for abolition of solitary confinement for children, pregnant women and people suffering from disabilities impacted by isolation, such as serious mental illness. Several states, including Colorado, Maine and New Jersey have enacted reforms to either ban or significantly reduce the practice over the past 10 years, and the Obama administration ushered in important new restrictions on solitary confinement for juvenile offenders in the federal prisons system in 2016.

There is a human tragedy unfolding all around us in our nations jails and prisons, and that is the callous use of torture as a first, second and final response to COVID-19, said Jessica Sandoval, Campaign Strategist for the Unlock the Box Campaign. As this Special Report demonstrates, solitary confinement creates an atmosphere of fear and mistrust that prevents sick people from reporting their symptoms, and puts incarcerated people, correctional officers and local communities at greater risk from COVID-19. Rather than developing a comprehensive plan that would take at-risk people out of correctional facilities, officials at the federal, state and local level are reversing years of hard fought human rights gains by dramatically increasing this uniquely American form of cruel and unusual punishment.

The Special Report, which draws on the expert analysis of leading medical, public health, and correctional health care professionals and criminal justice reform advocates working across the United States, paints a stark picture of the myriad ways in which under-prepared state and federal corrections officials have failed to develop comprehensive plans for containing the spread of COVID-19 inside their facilities, and have instead chosen to systematically respond with torture.

From information on the public record, we know that there has been a huge surge in the use of solitary confinement in prisons across the country, said Jean Casella, Co-Director of Solitary Watch. And from accounts by incarcerated people, family members, and prison health care staff, we know that this is causing widespread harm, while failing to contain the spread of the virus.

The reports key findings are as follows:

COVID-19 has led to an explosion in the use of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons, jails, and detention centers.

While COVID-19 presents a grave and growing threat to incarcerated people and correctional staff, the use of solitary confinement will increase, rather than curb, the spread of the virus.

Significantly reducing prison and jail populations remains the best way to protect the health and safety of incarcerated people, correctional staff, and communities from COVID-19.

For people left within prisons, COVID-19 can be contained without the dangerous use of solitary confinement through universal testing, the safe separation of positive and non-positive residents and staff, and high-quality personal protective equipment (PPE) for all people living and working in these facilities.

Quarantine and medical isolation in prisons must not resemble punitive solitary confinement, which is an internationally recognized form of torture.

The public health impacts of elevated solitary confinement during the COVID-19 crisis are enormous. Instead of being tested and provided with adequate medical attention, many incarcerated people demonstrating symptoms are swiftly transferred to solitary confinement where they are deprived of all social contact, receive no information or attention from medical staff, and are subject to unsanitary conditions.

To avoid such conditions, people held in prisons and jails are known to underreport symptoms of the virus which only further escalates its spread. Even if they do not demonstrate symptoms of COVID-19, incarcerated people report that they have been threatened with solitary or placed in solitary for refusing to follow rules that put them at risk, protesting unsafe conditions, or speaking out to the public or the press.

Using solitary confinement as the primary means to contain the virus only puts these populations and the individuals who monitor them at greater risk of contracting it. Failure to take bold action to stem the spread of the virus in correctional institutions could result in an additional 100,000 deaths, according to one recent report, and it is projected that more than two-thirds of those additional casualties would not be incarcerated individuals or staff, but rather people in their communities.

Drawing on the work of public health experts at Amend at UCSF, the Special Report shares best practices for saving the lives of incarcerated people and correctional staff for the current COVID crisis and beyond, including decarceration, using small group settings, and medical isolation as a means to properly treat infected individuals or those at high risk of infection. Finally, the Special Report explains why any positive changes should extend beyond the COVID-19 pandemic to ensure the long term health and safety of our communities.

STATEMENTS FROM UNLOCK THE BOX COALITION MEMBERS

Solitary confinement is not a public health strategy its torture, said Amy Fettig, Director, ACLU Stop Solitary Campaign. In order to stop the COVID-19 pandemic and protect people who live and work in prisons and jails we need science not punishment and prejudice to lead the way.

This report reveals a harrowing truth: that punishment, in the form of solitary confinement, is being used as a default policy when it should be a measure of last resort, said Johnny Perez, Director of the National Religious Campaign Against Tortures U.S. Prisons Program.The systemic use of punishment in the form of solitary confinement in response to the global public health crisis of the pandemic has allowed corrections systems to further harm the very people they are responsible for protecting. Facilities built for punitive isolation are being used to confine those who have tested positive for the coronavirus. Imagine having headache or fever and then being placed in a closet for reporting your symptoms. That is the reality our incarcerated neighbors are facing, and even more so at a time when the nation has come to its knees in recognition of state sponsored violence against black and brown people of color. People need care and not punishment, compassion not retribution, and second chances not death sentences.

Separating people who become infected with COVID-19 is a necessary public health measure to prevent the spread of COVId-19, particularly in prisons and jails, said Dr. Brie Williams, Founder and Director of Amend at UCSF. But turning to the punitive practice of solitary confinement in response to the pandemic will only make things worse.

MEDIA CONTACT: Madeline Bronstein, mbronstein@rabengroup.com, 585-410-4843

See the article here:

New Report Finds That 500% Increase in Use of Solitary Confinement During COVID-19 Puts Hundreds of Thousands of People at Risk - Solitary Watch

The capacity of the public health service will be built up to protect against further surges of Covid-19, according to the new draft programme for government.

Extra beds will be provided, childrens services will be extended and a range of patient charges will be cut, the document promises.

An intense focus will be maintained on Covid-19 following the principles of isolate, test, trace and treat the disease, to ensure a speedy reaction should there be an increase in cases.

While promising to ensure there is capacity for future surges of Covid-19, the document says we need to learn from and build on some responses during the pandemic, particularly in electronic health and prescribing.

It promises to accelerate the implementation of Slintecare, the 10-year programmes for the future of the health services agreed on an all-party basis in 2017.

Many of the healthcare responses to Covid-19 are important elements of Slintecare, and we will identify how to keep the gains, the document states. Underpinning our approach will be the provision of more health services in the community, increases in capacity including bed, ICU and critical care capacity and the promotion of good public health policy.

Among the specific promises in the programme for government are an increase in home-care hours and the introduction of a statutory home-care scheme; the extension of free GP care to more children and to carers; and the abolition of inpatient hospital charges for children.

Free dental care for children is to be extended and prescription charges and the drug payment scheme threshold will be reduced.

Carparking charges at hospitals will be capped where possible and the income threshold for medical cards for over-70s will be increased.

Talks will also begin with pharmacists on a new contract and an extension of their role in providing services.

The document promises the new national childrens hospital will be opened and building of the new maternity hospital at St Vincents Hospital will start once governance arrangements have been concluded.

The programme for government says the way claims for medical negligence are handled will be re-assessed so the Irish regime is brought into line with other OECD countries. Mediation may become a legal first resort for disputes.

There are plans to increase excise duty on tobacco, use taxation to discourage vaping and introduce planning restrictions on outlets selling junk food and drinks adjacent to schools.

The document also promises to work to end the admission of children to adult psychiatric units through an increase in inpatient beds and new ways of assigning these beds.

Sinn Fin health spokeswoman Louise OReilly described the health proposals in the document as a rehash of old announcements and a broad brushstroke, helicopter view of the future for the sector.

She expressed alarm over the documents failure to promise an end to private care in public hospitals, and to consultant pay inequality, and said Slaintecares proposals for universal healthcare had been replaced by a promise instead of affordable healthcare.

See the original post:

Programme for government: More hospital beds and community services promised - The Irish Times

I cannot think of a more radical definition of romantic love than the one taken by Lionel Trilling in The Last Lover, his 1958 essay on Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita. Here, Trilling argues that the defining criterion of real romantic love is scandal. Most crucially, love can only exist in opposition to marriage, which is a pragmatic arrangement about property, offspring, and communal and political alliance.

For scandal, writes Trilling, was of the essence of passion-love, which not only inverted the marital relationship of men and women but subverted marriage itself.

What then, was a modern writer to do if they wanted to write about such love? Adultery, which once threatened the sanctity of marriage to the point of appropriate scandal, does poorly in modern times: the very word is archaic; we recognise the possibility of its use only in law or in the past. While the recognition of the fear of marital infidelity did it for the audience of Othello, it doesnt cut much ice with modern audiences, for whom sexual jealousy is real but a moral assertion of that jealousy no longer sustainable. The word unfaithful, writes Trilling, which once had so terrible a charge of meaning, begins to sound quaint, seeming to be inappropriate to our moral code.

This paves the path for Trillings terrifying claim: that to maintain the true condition of passion-love, the writer must only tell the story that remains as far from marriage as possible, and widely out of the way of all practical consideration. Any working condition of mutuality would ruin everything, any concern for each others well being or prestige would make it look like a marriage, and hence out of bounds of true passion-love.

So that, Trilling reaches his conclusion, a man in the grip of an obsessional lust and a girl of twelve make the ideal couple for a story about love written in our time.

This is a dangerous claim at any time which is exactly what Trilling declares his intent to be. But it is fated to come across as especially unsettling in an age where the hashtag #MeToo has deepened our awareness of patriarchal modes of sexual exploitation, and the manner in which they exclude women from the sphere of political and sexual agency.

Biographical facts may introduce disturbing tremors here: Trillings own gender, race, age, position of power and privilege those of Nabokov perhaps, and why not that of Humbert Humbert? The disrupted equation of moral codes looks different surely when one is on the wrong side of the power game? Is it a whole lot easier to take aesthetic delight in the absence of mutuality as the marker of passion-love when the apple cart of power tilts in your direction?

What about spheres of love that have traditionally existed outside the normative codes of conjugal relation? Is their existence outside the very condition of their power? Perhaps not. The inquiry into their ethical condition of existence draws us into a black hole; neither is that Trillings concern. His real concern is that of artistic representation; the novel of romance, more precisely. The moral freedom, indeed, anarchy that nourishes the soul of transgressive art is risky business in life; it can set us back by centuries of hard-earned freedom and progress.

What happens, therefore, to literature when subjects outside the pale of normative behaviour win victories to gain proximity to the centre legal, societal and otherwise? Literature itself maybe a tall order, its bundle of dark idiosyncrasies. But what about the literary sphere the space of public discussion and reception, perhaps the Habermasian one?

Members and supporters of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) community take part in Delhi's Queer Pride Parade on Sunday, November 25, 2018. (Amal KS/HT PHOTO)

Does the tenor of expectation from (erstwhile) works of transgressive romance change in an especially noticeable way when victories are won in societies that have been, for whatever reasons, slow to nurture conditions of liberation?

***

Same-sex love ceased to be a crime in the eyes of the law in India on September 6, 2018. The judges who struck down section 377 of the Indian Penal Code did so on the grounds that it criminalises consensual sexual conduct between adults of the same sex.

Eyes of law, yes. The eyes of society? Thats a longer draw and a sadder, more nettlesome discussion.

The eyes of art? They caught on quickly too! The Rainbow Literature Festival, the first-full blown festival devoted to queer and inclusive culture, was held in Delhi in December 2018. The buoyant spirit of the age guided the excited arrival of new books. Two notable memoirs published in 2019 captured the light and shadow of secrecy and normalcy Rangnekars From Straight to Normal, and Now You Know, by editor and book-blogger Vivek Tejuja. An intriguing work of collective biography followed: Gay Icons of India, edited by Hoshang Merchant and Akshaya K Rath, profiles of 22 leading English-speaking, urban, queer protagonists of different fields of art and activism.

If such books and collections were not new, the attention given to such books now began to feel different. The private literary voice often spoke in the language of Dont Let Him Know, the title of Sandip Roys moving diasporic story of closeted identity, even when communal coming together shouted Out, the title of Minal Hajratwalas 2012 collection of queer stories from India.

Read more:Review:The Scent of God by Saikat Majumdar

But in the post-2018 world, it felt like things had come a long way: from the underground cult of Riyadh Wadias Bomgay to the 2019 mainstream Bollywood movie Ek Ladki ko Dekha to Aisa Laga, a lesbian romance featuring Sonam Kapoor.

For Trilling, adultery stopped being a desirable subject for romantic literature the day it stopped shocking people. Non-heteronormative sexual identities are still a shocking matter for the majority of Indians, for whom the abolition of Section 377 remains a small technical matter that is easily ignored.

The dream remains for the day when a same-sex romance occupies the same space as heteronormative romance for the day it no longer has to be marked different. But does it stand to lose a certain kind of artistic appeal when it is indistinguishable from the normative?

Saikat Majumdars most recent book is the novel The Scent of God (2019)

See more here:

Essay: The art and law of love - Hindustan Times

On May 25, four officers of the Minneapolis, Minnesota Police Department were involved in the caught-on-video killing of 46-year-old George Floyd. Floyd, a black man, told the white officer kneeling on his neck that he couldnt breathe. Officer Derek Chauvin continued kneeling despite these pleas and despite Floyds loss of consciousness.

Floyds death captured on video and widely spread across social media set off weeks-long national and global unrest over police brutality and racism. But the protests have also escalated calls for major policing reform in the US.

While many activists have called for an entire reimagining of US law enforcement, including the defunding or even the abolition of US police agencies others who likewise decry the deaths of Black Americans in police custody have urged for more pragmatic, piecemeal reforms to the criminal justice system such as officer trainings in de-escalation and implicit bias.

For example, former Vice President and presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, has even called for an increase in funding to police departments amid ongoing civil unrest. And House Majority Whip Rep. James Clyburn on CNNs State of the Union said, Nobody is going to defund the police. We can restructure the police forces.

The divide on police reform has marked a point of contention between Americans, who largely agree the anger behind ongoing protests against police brutality is justified, but dont support defunding police.

One approach reform advocates have called for include the introduction of a national system of standards.

On June 5, Rep. Mark Pocan, a Wisconsin Democrat and leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, put forth legislation to make federal funding for local law enforcement agencies contingent upon their meeting of national standards for training on de-escalation practices, use of force, and bias. A civilian commission would be created to determine such standards, The Hill reported.

Law enforcement experts who spoke to Insider said they believed that improvements to and uniformity among the way local US police forces train their officers are not the entire solution but it could be a step in the right direction.

From Los Angeles to New York City to Minneapolis, some of the countrys largest police forces have different approaches to their training programs.

Los Angeles Police Department officers receive 960 hours of training in the academy, which includes scenario-based training, a spokesperson for the department told Insider. The LAPD academy training has included specific training on de-escalation techniques since 2017, the spokesperson said.

Officers are also given four hours of implicit bias training, though the LAPD spokesperson said: implicit bias training is also integrated into the 16 LAPD basic training modules.

Officers and Department personnel are provided in-service training and perishable skills training consistently over the course of their entire career, the spokesperson said. When large scale or sweeping policy changes are made, the entire Department will undergo training.

Training officers about their potential implicit biases is an example of such training, he said.

Officers at the New York Police Department are trained in de-escalation tactics during their scenario-based training unit, according to the departments website on officers training, which a spokesperson referred to Insider. The site does not specify the length of such training and did not mention whether officers receive any training related to implicit racial or other biases.

According to The New York Times, however, the city of New York began to provide its officers with implicit bias training in 2018 as part of a two-year $US4.5 million contract with a Florida company called Fair and Impartial Policing. Police officers in the state must undergo at least 700 hours in total of training before becoming law enforcement officers, according to the state of New York.

A website for the Minneapolis Police Academy says officers are trained in nine areas that include defensive tactics, ethics, firearms, and report writing during a 14-16 week program. The website does not mention any training in de-escalation tactics or how or if officers are trained about implicit biases.

There is almost no uniformity in police training programs, particularly when it comes to their focus on their training in implicit biases, Dr. Rashawn Ray, a fellow in governance studies at The Brookings Institution and executive director of the Lab for Applied Social Science Research (LASSR) at the University of Maryland told Insider.

What these look like on a local level are like apples to oranges, Ray said. They are so different from one another. Honestly, its not even like apples to oranges its more like fruit to vegetables. Thats just how different they are. That is something that definitely needs to change.

Ray, who offers police agencies training in implicit biases as part of his work with LASSR, said the differences in the ways officers are trained in implicit biases alone prevents large-scale changes with in the US law enforcement system.

Some agencies request a two-hour training for officers to learn about potential implicit biases, Ray told Insider. Other agencies can request days-long training that includes the use of virtual reality technology employed by the University of Maryland researchers. Theres little consistency among agencies, he said.

We dont see huge payoffs because of the huge variations across the board, Ray told Insider. Two hours of an implicit bias training is not going to change someones biases they might have, Ray said.

Chris Burbank, Vice President of Law Enforcement Strategy at the Centre for Policing Equality, told Insider he did not support the nationalization of law enforcement the Federal Bureau of Investigation, for example, wouldnt be effective in policing local communities, he said.

I believe policing is best done locally by people who are invested in the community, live in the community, participate in the community, and understand it, Burbank, who served for nine years as chief of the Salt Lake City, Utah, police department, added. But there should be national standards set.

Beyond standardising training procedures for US cops, Burbank said there should be national standards required for becoming a law enforcement officer. All potential police officers, for example, should have a four-year education prior to becoming a law enforcement officer, he said.

Ray said that national standards for police officer training could help reduce officers biases.

I think thats something that the public desires, Ray said of uniform law enforcement training practices. That is something that law enforcement does not desire.

He said police agencies would likely reject having training nationalized, partially over fears they would lose funding dedicated to training their officers. Still, Ray said that national standards could be employed while still allowing local instructors to educate new and existing officers.

LASSR even offers courses to provide training to the people who train law enforcement officers, he added as an example.

You always want the best-trained police officers, Burbank told Insider. You want them to have the most information, and you want them to have the most practical information you can always give them. However, we have viewed training especially around bias, and de-escalation, as the end-all.

He added: The idea has been if you just trained the racist cops, they wouldnt be racist anymore and you wouldnt have these problems. What we have found is that the policies, the practice, and the procedures in your police department contribute much more to the disparity or the potential outcome of bias in policing than the individual racism or bias of the officers.

As Insider previously reported, studies have suggested that implicit bias training as it currently is executed has not been effective alone in reducing the bias of police officers.

Burbank suggested the elimination of consent searches the practice where police officers ask individuals if they can search their property without a warrant was an example of a policy change that could be implemented nationally to lead to fewer instances of implicit biases. He said these types of searches disproportionately target African Americans despite them having a low rate of success.

Burbank also pointed toward the use of a chokehold and other carotid restraints as policies police forces could eliminate nationally to reduce instances of implicit bias. Police agencies across the country, including in Minneapolis where Floyd was killed, have announced bans on chokehold and similar neck restraints.

What we want to do is start to identify the polices what are the practices, that the officers are using that are introducing bias, Burbank said.

Ray also suggested the wider deployment of new technologies may help encourage officers to act against their biases. As part of his work training officers with LASSR, Ray said hes found more success when using a virtual reality lab to place officers in hands-on situations that help trigger their potential biases.

Its not just about implicit bias everyone has implicit biases its the fact that biases are more likely to come out when people are stressed, when people are scared, and when peoples adrenalin is running. Thats an equation that happens to police officers almost every day.

Training is not just about telling law enforcement what implicit biases are, he added. Its about pointing them out and training officers about ways they can overcome them.

Its about improving police officers in situations where biases where theyre more likely to exist and then training the officers to reduce those biases. That is the most important thing about implicit bias training. Its not simply to education on the definition of it, he said.

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There is no national standard for police trainings across the US but uniformity could help combat systemic issues, experts say - Business Insider...