Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

The deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and countless other unarmed black civilians in the US have sparked a rage that is contagious. Cities as far as London, Berlin, Melbourne, and Tokyo have seen huge demonstrations in solidarity with the growing Black Lives Matter uprising in the US. Meanwhile, in India we are still trying to work out how to respond.

One response circulating in elite circles is what journalist Rana Ayyub calls weari[ing] the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag as a fashion accessory: posting or tweeting about the movement in order to opportunistically cash in on its moral and cultural capital. Please dont do this: better responses are possible. Ask yourself these five questions to figure out if you actually support the principles of the movement and learn to put your support, if any, to work.

This shouldnt be an easy question. Personal racism does not just mean a straightforward revulsion towards black people or minorities (and yes, this includes religious and caste minorities too). It includes stereotyping, implicit bias, whitewashing, exoticising, purity politics, endogamy and much more that is deeply embedded into our socialisation.

This type of racism cant just be tackled in one individuals mind: reversing it requires anti-racist education to be institutionalised in schools and families from a young age. Black activists in the US have been doing this work with campaigns to mandate Black History Month in schools each February and to create classroom resources for teaching about difference.

But in India, parents and teachers are unlikely to teach acceptance to children when most Indian adults themselves are notoriously racist. Indian cricketers derogatorily call black colleagues kalu, Indian entertainers are fairness cream salespeople and mobs going after African residents in Delhi may well be led by Indian politicians.

Indians abroad, cushioned in caste privilege and enjoying the benefits wrought by anti-racist struggles, now increasingly side with white supremacist leaders like US President Donald Trump. Indeed, at this moment of global uprising, many see Indias most visible icon of justice Gandhi as standing on the wrong side of anti-black racism. Protestors targeting Gandhis statue right alongside the statues of slaveholders should remind us that interrogating and undoing all types of personal racism is a simple prerequisite to saying black lives matter.

The second question to ask yourself is: do I think minorities lives in my own country matter? There has rarely been a time when this question has been more urgent in India than now. From encounter killings to custodial death and torture, from drastic over-policing to arrest without trial, from everyday harassment to being disappeared, the burden of police violence in India falls squarely on minorities.

A 2019 survey showed that 50% of police personnel in India believe Muslims are more likely to commit crimes, and it shows.

Just months ago, Delhi police joined Hindutva supporters to attack the citys Muslims, following a decades-old pattern of police working as enforcers of majoritarian might rather than law. Indeed, just as George Floyd lynching became a viral video, so too did a clip of Faizan, the young Muslim man savagely beaten by the police on the roadside and made to sing the national anthem. For Faizan and the many other Muslims thus murdered, there have been no protests, no arrests, no charges, no dismissals, and no outrage.

Dalits and Adivasis similarly know the police mainly as collaborators in upper-caste violence. Rather than registering cases against caste Hindu offenders, police are more likely to themselves detain, brutalise, extort, rape, and mass murder minorities. Just Google Dalit lynched and youll see headlines no less horrific than if you Google African American lynched.

So dont chant George Floyds name if you dont care about Jitu Khatik (the 26-year-old Dalit man who died in Rajasthan police custody in February), and dont talk about black incarceration if you dont mention the dozens of Muslims being arbitrarily arrested during a pandemic.

For all those who want to say black lives matter but then continue to patriotically support the Indian police force, army, prisons and anti-terror laws, Ive got bad news. The strands of the Black Lives Matter movement that are quickly becoming dominant are not striving only for minority civil rights or against racist police, not demanding just the arrest of offending officers, and not calling at all for police retraining and legal reform: instead, they are calling for the abolition of policing and incarceration altogether.

Just as abolitionists of slavery believed that slavery could not be fixed or reformed [but] needed to be abolished, so too todays abolitionists arent trying to reform policing and prisons (themselves byproducts of slavery) but to shrink [them] into non-existence because they see that institutionalised punishment does not make us more safe. They argue that repackaging the problems of poverty, homelessness, mental illness, and addiction as crime only amounts to treating the symptom instead of the disease and that too with a treatment (caging and state violence) often worse than the disease itself.

This is why the demand coming from the streets of Minneapolis (where Floyd was murdered) and from countles s other American cities is to defund and disband the police, replacing it with community-based public safety measures.

In India, where half the public condones police violence even before a trial, abolition seems like a laughable idea. Even the other half isnt calling to shrink the scope of policing. Well-meaning NGOs put out reports insisting that strengthening the rule of law requires building Indias police capacities. Journalists bemoan how India only has 144 police personnel per 100,000 people, falling short of the United Nations recommendation of 222. Even Human Rights Watch calls for higher police budgets. The entire discussion focuses on how to increase Indias investment in policing.

But this misses the fact that policing isnt just about the police: its about the use of force to enforce an existing order. By that definition, policing in India by paramilitary, military, jailers, and sanctioned vigilante groups already enjoys better funding than education, welfare schemes, and public health do. So even though abolition is inconceivable in India at the moment, yet if you dare not conceive it, you cant lay claim to this movement.

Abolition seeks not just to end policing but to also end the unequal society that necessitates policing in the first place. This is why Americans in the streets are making what wed see in India as economic demands rather than just human rights demands, calling to defund institutions of punishment and to instead invest public money in schools, hospitals, housing, social security, and work for all, especially marginalised citizens.

Protestors point out that up to 40% of many US cities budgets go to policing, an amount larger than what is spent on violence and substance abuse prevention, mental health, affordable housing and schools put together. How much safer could communities be if this money was invested in residents rather than armed patrollers?

Meanwhile in India, Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis are the poorest of every rung of the poor: they already cant breathe in India even before the police or mobs get to them. So by all means, say that black lives matter but only if nine people owning as much wealth as half the country infuriates you, and only if India spending 9% of its budget on the military and only 3% on health is also the target of your ire. But if Indias system of hereditary poverty and disinvestment from minorities does not morally horrify you, then you arent an ally.

The current protests in the US have been compared to the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in India: both saw a largely young crowd of protestors, widespread dissent from big cities to small towns, majority groups coming out in solidarity, and a brutal reception from police and politicians. However, despite cosmetic similarities the two protests differ in essentials.

Unlike the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act whose demands were primarily defensive (remove this law and return to the existing order), Black Lives Matters demands have been offensive (change the existing order by abolishing policing). Even when some factions of the movement call for reform, others immediately propose revolutionary alternatives for direct mass accountability.

The tactics of Black Lives Matter are also revolutionary, drawing on both the civil disobedience of Martin Luther King Jr. and the militancy of the Black Panthers. This is why the most potent symbols of todays movement are all moments of collective law-breaking, whether it is the Minneapolis Police Departments 3rd Precinct on fire, slaveholder Edward Colstons statue being thrown in the harbour in England, or protestors throwing tear gas back at the US National Guard outside the White House.

These images sit in stark contrast to the movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act as symbolised by a peaceful sit-in at Shaheen Bagh, a tactic that put protestors in the defensive position while allowing the government to dominate media coverage and demobilise public support. All this points to an urgent need to rethink the watered-down version of satyagraha (as a sit in without antagonism or leverage) which now comes all too naturally to us.

However, if you prefer law and order to dissent and justice, and want the appearance of a revolutionary without taking on the labours and risks of one, dont say black lives matter.

Aparna Gopalan is PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at Harvard University. Her research and writing focuses on the reproduction of inequality and poverty in rural India.

Also read

As Black Lives Matter protests grow, Indian students in the US grapple with fear and hypocrisy

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Five questions for Indians (who think they are) in solidarity with Black Lives Matter - Scroll.in

Over the past two decades, spending on police has continued to climb nationwide, making up one-third to one-half of some cities' entire budgets.

The police-related deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor have taken police defunding, once considered a far-left issue, and pushed it to the fore.

Calls to defund or even abolish the police have flooded Twitter, appeared on protest signs, and been echoed by lawmakers around the country.

But what do these ideas mean in practice?

Organizations like Black Lives Matter, People's Budget LA, and Black Visions Collective want to move taxpayer dollars away from surveillance and broken-windows policing toward addressing community needs.

"We need divestment from the police and a radical investment in communities of color, including housing, jobs, and education," DeRay Mckesson, a Black Lives Matter organizer and cofounder of the police-reform think tank Campaign Zero, wrote on Medium.

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Most in the "defund the police" camp don't expect law enforcement to be stripped of all financing. Instead, they're asking for some of the billions poured into police coffers to be reallocated to services that better serve the community and result in less violence and death at cops' hands.

A woman holds a placard calling for the defunding of the Seattle Police Department at a Black Lives Matter demonstration on June 6, 2020. Toby Scott/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Currently, police in much of the U.S. are the ones responding to overdoses, homelessness, suicide attempts, and other social-welfare calls. When the Minneapolis City Council examined the city's 911 logs, for example, it found most really required the fire department, EMTs, or mental-health professionals.

According to reformers, when law enforcement shows up the situation often escalates into a physical confrontation. An officer trained to see killing as "not that big of a deal" is more likely to choose a violent response rather than de-escalation tactics.

About half of those killed by police had some kind of mental disability, according to a 2015 Ruderman Foundation report.

The notion of taking these responsibilities away from law enforcement is gaining traction: According to a June 2020 poll from Data for Progress, nearly 70% of voters support creating a non-police agency of first responders to address situations involving mental health issues or substance abuse.;

In Los Angeles, the People's Budget was created to show exactly how defunding the police might work in the city. The report suggests just 5.7% of funds be allocated to law enforcement, with 24% going to "reimagined community safety" programs, and 44% on "universal aid and crisis management."

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (left) announced he is cutting the NYPD budget and reallocating funds to support youth services. Associated Press

On Sunday, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced he was cutting the NYPD's budget and moving resources to youth and social services. Currently, the police force's $6 billion budget is more than the city spends on housing, homelessness, and youth and community development combined, according to The New York Post.

De Blasio didn't share exactly how much of the NYPD budget would be slashed, but he said, "we are committed to shifting resources to ensure that the focus is on our young people," according to CBS 2.

New York City State Senator Julia Salazar, who tweeted Friday that "We should call to defund the NYPD," said the growing support is "surreal."

"To see legislators who aren't even necessarily on the left supporting at least a significant decrease in New York police department funding is really very encouraging," Salazar told the Guardian.

Some activists do want to go further than just cutting budgets and completely abolish the police.

The grassroots Minneapolis group MPD150, for example, is calling for a "police-free future."

"We're not abolishing help. We're abolishing police," MPD150's Arianna Nason said in a statement. "That's very different. We have to do the work to imagine something different and to listen to what people in different neighborhoods and communities want."

The words "Abolish Police" is spray-painted on the sidewalk as about 1,000 protested the death of George Floyd in downtown, Los Angeles, on Friday, June 5, 2020. Jay L. Clendenin / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

MPD150 advocates combatting the underlying issues that foster criminality and police action with "good, well-paying jobs, affordable housing, healthy food, empowering education, accessible health care [and] removal of toxins."

8toAbolition, another police-abolition group, argues the kind of reforms forwarded in Campaign Zero's 8 Can't Wait campaign like banning chokeholds and instituting a use-of-force continuum for cops "have already been tried and failed."

8toAbolition supports defunding law enforcement, but also removing police from schools, freeing people from prison, demilitarizing communities, repealing laws that "criminalize survival," and providing housing for all.

"The end goal of these reforms is not to create better, friendlier, or more community-oriented police or prisons," according to a statement on its website, "but to build toward a society without police and prisons."

Total police abolition may not be a reality any time soon, but Minneapolis may see some of these ideas tested very soon. On Sunday, a veto-proof supermajority in the Minneapolis' City Council voted to dissolve the city's police department.

Council President Lisa Bender told CNN the council's goal is "to rebuild with our community a new model of public safety that actually keeps our community safe."

"The idea of having no police department is certainly not in the short term," Bender added.

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Experts explain what abolishing the police could actually look like - Insider - INSIDER

As protests continue to spread in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, one seemingly radical, decades-old idea has been thrust to the forefront of mainstream discourse: prison abolition.

With over two million people locked up in prisons and jails, the United States incarceration rate is the highest in the world, to the point where the country constitutes about five percent of the worlds population and yet houses 25 percent of the worlds prisoners. Black and brown people are disproportionately imprisoned, sexual abuse is rampant, labor is exploited, and prolonged solitary confinementdenounced as a form of torture by the United Nationsis commonplace. The brutality of these conditions becomes all the more salient when compared to other developed Western nations, where even life sentences for murder rarely involve being condemned to spend the remainder of ones days behind bars.

Prison abolitionists argue that it is not enough to simply reform our current criminal justice systemthat it must be completely dismantled and, in its place, society must invest in communities and address harm in other ways. The two foremost leaders of the contemporary prison-abolition movement are famed activist Angela Davis and the scholar and geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore. In 1997, they cofounded the organization Critical Resistance with the mission to build an international movement to end the Prison Industrial Complex by challenging the belief that caging and controlling people makes us safe. (You may have encountered the organizations graphic chart breaking down the effectiveness of reform vs. abolition circulating on social media as of late.)

With the concept of prison abolition gaining increased visibility and unprecedented momentum, GQ spoke to Woods Ervin, an organizer with Critical Resistance who has been involved in the movement for a decade, about its basic tenets, goals, and visions for a prison-free future.

GQ: Prison abolition is an idea, when first encountered, that can feel incredibly radical and infeasible. How did you first encounter it, and was there a particular moment where you felt like the switch had been flipped for you?

Woods Ervin: The theory clicked for me around 2008. I was working at the time with queer and trans young people of color in Chicago. Part of the daily work was trying to support, engage, and help develop young people who are being constantly targeted by the prison-industrial complex [PIC]. I had a firsthand understanding of how the PIC comes into people's lives and shrinks their life chances.

These were young people who were 13, 14, 15, getting kicked out of their homes for being queer and trans, and who, out of survival, were constantly coming into contact with the prison-industrial complex. For me, that put it in really stark relief. Because they couldn't figure out how to get out of the systemic nature of it, there was nothing for those young people. They were just falling through the cracks.

It clarified for me that the prison-industrial complex needed to be pulled apart. I think it was then that the politics crystallized, and it was in the practice of organizing with Critical Resistance that the work of how to do it crystallized.

As an organizer, when you're giving someone the elevator pitch for prison abolition, what do you tell them?

I say that abolition is a political vision with a goal of eliminating imprisonment, policing, and surveillance and creating lasting alternatives to punishment and imprisonment. That it's not just about getting rid of building cages, it's about actually undoing the society that continues to feed on and maintain the oppression of masses of people through punishment, violence, and control. Because the prison-industrial complex isn't an isolated system, abolition is a broad strategy. And so we have to be building models today that develop and represent how we want to live in the future. It's both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.

The prison-industrial complex isnt broken. Its doing exactly what it's meant to do.

Compared to other countries, the U.S. has a particularly cruel prison system. You can look to, say, some of the Scandinavian countries and see more humane prison systems and life sentences that only last 10 years. To prison abolitionists, why is criminal justice reform based on a system like that insufficient?

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What Is Prison Abolition? How Would It Work? - GQ

Image: USAF counterterrorism training exercise

At a moment when the call to abolish police and prisons is louder than ever, we should also demand an end to counterterrorism, which functions largely to ensnare people of color.

In recent weeks, the United States has experienced a nationwide uprising demanding change. From this, the abolition of police and prisons has emerged as a leading demand of protesters. Contemporary abolitionists see themselves as completing the unfinished work of ending racial slavery. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, one of the most influential contemporary abolitionists, argues that prisons have become the catch-all solution to any political problem: political dissent, interpersonal violence, the people and land rendered surplus by capitalismall these and more are solved through building and filling cages. Therefore, to abolish prisons and policing, Gilmore and others argue, we must create a culture with a robust set of solutions to crises of housing, safety, health care, education, and joblessness.

Incarceration and counterterrorism are two arms of the same state apparatus. This is driven home by the sight of police attacking citizens with surplus weapons from the War on Terror, using counterterrorism techniques learned abroad.

In their effort to inflame opposition to protesters and their demands, President Donald Trump and Attorney General William Barr recently named Antifa a terrorist organization. It isnt clear, so doing, whether they understood what Antifa (an umbrella term for antifascist activism) is, or how it stands in relation to ongoing protests. Nonetheless, their actions draw attention to the fact that incarceration and counterterrorism are two arms of the same state apparatus. This is further driven home by the sight of police attacking citizens with surplus military weapons from the War on Terror, often using counterterrorism warfare techniques learned from the Israel Defense Forces and other counterinsurgency training abroad.

This suggests that abolition can offer a compelling perspective on terrorism as well, as an alternative to the standard liberal and conservative approaches. For conservatives, terrorism typically refers to non-state political violencemostly from the left and from people of colorand it should be crushed with the full weight of the state. Liberals are mostly in agreement with this definition, but add that the violence committed by white supremacists and other far-right extremists should be considered terrorism as well. In both conservative and liberal readings, it is not possible to conceive of abolishing the concept and infrastructure of counterterrorism.

Abolition offers a third option, charting a path to safety from non-state and state violence by allowing us to ask an unspeakable question: What makes the terrorist bad in the first place? From there, we may generate new possibilities that conventional liberal and conservative approaches both rule out.

For much of its history in the twentieth century, abolition was terrorism in the eyes of the state. By the Cold War and into the 1960s and 70s, a range of politics inside of domestic freedom struggles, which included communism and anticolonialism, were painted with the broad brush of terrorism. For the U.S. empire, fighting communism abroad meant keeping a close eye on Asian and African struggles to expel their European colonizers. What would happen, the United States feared, if the newly decolonized nations turned to communism, as had Cuba? And so the United States preached its gospel of freedom while crushing colonized peoples efforts toward it. Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation has long served as the dictionary definition of terrorism. Meanwhile, terrorists back home also included anticolonial actors, specifically Puerto Ricans seeking independence and Black Power organizations. The Black Panthers were called terrorists in the late 1960s and 70s, and many continue to be political prisoners even in todays global pandemic. In 1985 the local police in Philadelphia used the term terrorist for the black organization MOVE before the police bombed its residential headquarters, killing five children. And since 2013, Black Liberation Army and Black Panther member Assata Shakur has been on the FBIs list of most wanted terrorists. In short, the contemporary concept of terrorism arose from the U.S. counterinsurgency to anticolonial, antiracist, and anti-capitalist struggles, whether or not they actually hurt or killed people. Joseph Dibbee and the Earth Liberation Front and Animal Liberation Front, for example, have been identified as terrorists even though the state has never accused them of harming anyone.

The contemporary concept of terrorism arose from the U.S. counterinsurgency to anticolonial, antiracist, and anti-capitalist struggles, whether or not they actually hurt or killed people.

Moreover, many domestic issues of concern to abolitionistsranging from national inaction on climate change to the frightening political aspirations of Amazon to the state kidnapping of migrant childrenhave been raised in the house that counterterrorism built. For example, New Orleans residents who survived Hurricane Katrina found themselves facing private military contractor Blackwaterof Iraq War infamywhich was hired to patrol the citys streets and police survivors the Army Times described as an insurgency. After 2001 FEMA, which was responsible for much of the mishandling in the aftermath of Katrina, was moved from being an independent agency to operating under the newly created Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which fields a lot of the resources that go toward counterterrorism. The state continues to expand and bureaucratize counterterrorism. The creation of the Denaturalization Section of the Department of Justice was announced on February 26 of this year; this section of the DOJs immigration office strips citizenship rights from naturalized citizens in order to bring justice to terrorists, war criminals, sex offenders and other fraudsters who illegally obtained naturalization. These are but a few of the many examples of how federal restructuring organized around counterterrorism has worsened the lives of poor people and people of color.

Today it is possible for the state to execute any degree of violence against those it labels terrorists. The power and value of this label for justifying state violence comes from its accumulated racial meanings from the mid-twentieth century to today.

Since 2001 the terrorist has come to be imagined almost exclusively as Muslim or Arab. This confusingly ill-defined minority has been made the domestic subject of the War on Terror and is subject to its devices, including indefinite detention, the No Fly List, extraordinary rendition, and extrajudicial killing. For example, in 2011, President Barack Obama ordered a targeted drone strike to kill sixteen-year-old Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen from birth, while he was in Yemen. Leading up to this act of preemptive state violence, the teenager was not charged withnor even suspected ofhaving committed or supported any acts of terrorism. But his father, Anwar Al-Awlaki, was charged with providing material support to terrorists and killed two weeks earlier in a targeted drone strike. The young Al-Awlaki was the second (his father the first) extrajudicial killing of a U.S. citizen via drone strike. Violence against children is common practice in the house that counterterrorism built: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was also a creation of the post-9/11 Department of Homeland Security, and so the migrant children being abused and dying in U.S. custody today are also victims of the furious rush of resources and energy into fighting terrorism.

Increasingly there are calls on the left for the state to classify the KKK as a terrorist organization, renewed this week after a KKK member drove his car into a crowd of protesters at the Robert E. Lee monument in Richmond on June 7. But this call is misguided. To correct the problem, we do not need things on the right to be classified as terrorism, too; we need to void the category of terrorism completely. It cannot be salvaged because the very thing that gives it its meaning is its racial connotations, even when it is used for white supremacists. Far from a neutral word meaning very, very bad, terrorism is a deeply racialized concept. It is because of those racial meanings that the word has more punch than white supremacy, for example.

To correct the problem, we do not need things on the far right to be classified as terrorism, too; we need to void the category of terrorism completely. It cannot be salvaged because the very thing that gives it its meaning is its racial connotations.

Liberal arguments attempting to challenge the violence of counterterrorism practices and the stigma of the label of terrorism will emphasize what they believe to be hypocrisy: if a white man and a brown man do the same thing, the former is explained away as an individual aberration due to mental illness while the latter is a terrorist. The naming of hypocrisy here is not only insufficient for challenging this problem, but is also misguided. Counterterrorism is an organizing principle for delineating and managing problematic populations domestically and internationally. This is not an inadvertently racist label that can be peeled off of brown men and stuck onto white men. Rather, the racial history and significance of the concept is constitutive of terrorism. The terrorist is a racial, epistemic, ideological, and material other.

By calling Antifa terrorists, the president and attorney general sought to use this power of terrorism as a label to nullify the critique of the so-called terrorist. To be called a terrorist is, by definition, to have ones political ideas exist outside the scope of acceptable discourse and licit protest. In this way the terrorist can not only be disappeared as a person, but their politics can be disappeared, too.

To change the meaning of terrorist would require that we dismantle the global infrastructure built around fighting terrorisma truly abolitionist goal. If we want to call white supremacist violence terrorism as part of an effective strategy to stop it, then the word terrorism has to lose all the racist meanings that give it rhetorical value in the first place.

In approaching a solution, abolition, often maligned as extreme, is instead perhaps the least violent of all potential remedies to the carceral state and its counterterrorism because it grasps at the root of the problem and would not trade in partial remedies that simply reproduce the problem. Conservative and liberal approaches, meanwhile, ramify the problems they claim to stop. For example, counterterrorism relies heavily on coercing informants into entrapping people in fake terrorist plots, usually in exchange for money or to avoid jail time. Cases of this include a Bangladeshi Muslim teenager who was under NYPD orders to create and capture terrorist suspects in order to avoid a drug charge, a Pakistani Muslim gas station owner in the case of the Newburgh Four who served as an informant to avoid deportation, and so many more: there were 580 terrorism prosecutions from 2001 to 2015, and 317 of these cases involved an informant. This is one way that counterterrorism quite straightforwardly produces the very problem it purports to stop, which is to say nothing of how war, colonialism, dispossession, and other means of repression produce more violence.

To those who nevertheless would entrust their safety to the police and state counterinsurgency agents, abolitionists ask: But are we safe right now? Do we feel that we are safe surrounded by prisons, police, and preemptive anti-terrorism and policing measures? In response to this question, many feel a visceral no, which tells us not only that we need to fight for a different world, but that we are ready for it.

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Terror and Abolition - Boston Review

michael barbaro

From The New York Times, Im Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily.

Today, several major U.S. cities are now proposing ways to defund and even dismantle their police departments. John Eligon on the thinking behind those plans and what they might look like in practice.

Its Tuesday, June 9.

(CHANTING) I cant breathe! I cant breathe!

In the early days of the protests after George Floyd was killed

(CHANTING) No justice, no peace! No justice, no peace!

it was just pure emotions and raw rage.

[EXPLETIVE] these racist [EXPLETIVE] police!

But pretty soon, once the more fiery protests and fiery unrest died down, then we started seeing the organizers come in and talking about what they want. And one thing we quickly saw were these face masks that people were wearing. They were black, and they had yellow writing on them. And they said, Defund police.

Hmm.

And from there, you start hearing these calls at protest, at rallies.

(CHANTING) Defund the police! Defund the police!

You start hearing, Defund the police.

You start hearing calls to abolish the police. You start seeing people waving signs. And it became clear that this was an opening that a lot of activists saw to take this moment of a very brutal police killing and turn it into something much larger.

Do the right thing!

Defund the police!

So John, what do these concepts defund, dismantle, abolish the police what exactly do they mean?

To defund, when activists say that, what they mean is taking money away from the police departments budget and redirect it toward other things whether that be social services, agencies, maybe mental health agencies that can do functions that police are often called on to do.

Mm-hmm.

But if you fully defund it, you can get to a space where the police department is abolished. And so essentially, what that means is that there is no more police department as we know it. You dont call these men and women in blue shirts to come racing to your door with their guns in hand. It means that they have to figure out some other form of providing that public safety, and the police department would not be that form.

And where did these concepts come from?

Well, at their core, they come from the problems and issues that especially communities of color, especially black communities, have had with policing. They see police coming into their communities to brutalize them, not to protect and serve them. And that has really influenced this desire to keep the police away, to do something else. And weve seen, basically, that governments and police forces, they respond with certain reforms. Weve seen efforts for body cameras. Weve seen diversifying the police departments. Weve seen changes to the rules on use of force.

Mm-hmm.

But what became clear to a lot of todays activists, and what they say explicitly, is that these reforms are not working. If you look at since Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson, Missouri six years ago, the police have continued to kill people at high rates, and especially black people at disproportionately high rates. And so for them, the only solution is to tear it down and build something new.

So John, what might it actually look like in practice to defund or abolish a police department?

So for instance, if someone is homeless and theyre struggling on the streets, a person can call 9-1-1, and instead of an armed police officer being sent out, perhaps there can be an outreach worker from a homeless services agency. Or if you have someone having a mental health episode, then again, you can call 9-1-1, and instead of a police officer, maybe a health care worker, a mental health worker will come out. And the idea behind it is to really cut down the interactions between armed police officers and civilians. And by doing that, the hope is that it will reduce their conflict and the potential for people getting hurt or killed by police officers.

Right. I mean, that makes a certain sense, especially for a community where theres not a lot of violent crime. But every community is different, right? And some towns, some cities I think about New York City, for example have a significantly higher rate of violent crime that would seem to require having armed police. So how do activists think about that?

For a lot of the activists that I spoke to, the issue was about centering public safety on communities. And one activist that I spoke to, Arianna Nason, she said essentially its going to be up to each community to decide what public safety looks like for itself.

Its going to be up to every community to decide what they need. We cant decide that.

So maybe thats armed patrols. Maybe thats mental health workers. Maybe thats some sort of mobile units with social workers sitting in it, and people are trained in using force and different things. One of the big ideas is this idea of community policing, community watch. And its interesting. I had said isnt an issue, though, with community policing or community patrols, neighborhood watch, that if I walk into that community, as a black man with dreadlocks, if I walk into one of these communities, we see what happens with neighborhood watch. We see Trayvon Martin. We see Ahmaud Arbery.

Should that be a concern, then? I guess with this community-type based model that certain people who look a certain way might go into the neighborhood, and that community might decide to take it into their own hands and then take it overboard, I guess.

And she took off her sunglasses. She looked at me, and she said

No, I get that. And Ill be really real with you. For me, personally, I dont have all the answers for that. I dont. And I wish I did. A lot of it is

Honestly, I dont really know the answer to that right now.

Huh.

She was not sure exactly what the answer was. And see, this is all to say, its still very tricky and very much a work in progress. But what she did say is that the current system also is not working for me either. So its a matter of what are they going to do differently? And they believe that something drastically different needs to be done.

Mm-hmm. As best you can tell, would any of the familiar elements of an existing police department Im thinking, for the sake of argument, homicide detectives, special victims units that investigate sexual assault or rape do those remain? Do they take a different form? Do they adopt a different name? Has that been fleshed out?

I would say, no, its not been fleshed out. Because again, we go back to the fact that this is not going to be some federal commission, or even state commission or a city commission for anywhere thats going to come up with, like, these are the rules for public safety now. And these are all things that need to be worked out. And I think what people say with things like homicide investigations, with sex crimes investigations and things like that, they say a couple of things. One, the police are not doing a good job at those anyways. So you have lots of cities where the clearance rate on homicides and other investigations is miserable. You had, even here in Minneapolis, there was a big scandal with all the rape kits that they had untested. So they had a lot of issues with crimes that were not being investigated properly. And then, the second thing that people say is that those jobs can be taken up by specialized, trained people. You can build new institutions to do those things that arent necessary policing. I did talk to one council member who said, maybe theres still police, but for very, very limited role, and many of their responsibilities are farmed out. You know, anything short of some sort of active violence, you dont need police for. So in some peoples eyes, that would still be a police force. But one thing that the people who are most ardent about abolishing the police or defunding the police, even, they make it clear that they dont just want a system in which its police in another name, police with another uniform on.

And these demands to defund the police, theyve actually been brewing in Minneapolis for several years now. Ever since a police killing back in 2015, theres been several local activist groups working on it. And those activist groups came together this past weekend in what was probably the biggest and most clearest demand for defunding the police.

Well be right back.

(CHANTING) Abolish the M.P.D.!

So there were hundreds of activists who went and gathered in front of the mayor Jacob Freys house.

Abolish the M.P.D.! And they had a megaphone. They were chanting. They were screaming. And sure enough, the mayor came out to talk to the protesters. He kind of made his way through the crowd, walked up to the front, and you had one of the lead organizers for a group called the Black Visions Collective. Kandace Montgomery, she was standing up on a riser there, talking down in a megaphone to the mayor.

Jacob Frey, we have a yes-or-no question for you. Yes or no, will you commit to defunding Minneapolis Police Department?

[INAUDIBLE]

And you could tell, like, there is this hesitation because he knows this is not going to go well, right? You have all these very vocal, very ardent activists around you who want you to defund the police.

Will you defund the Minneapolis Police Department?

[CROWD MURMURING]

All right, be quiet yall. Be quiet, because its important that we actually hear this. Its important that we hear this, because if yall dont know, hes up for re-election next year.

[CROWD CHEERING]

And then

I do not support the full abolition of the police department.

All right!

Youre wasting our time! Get the [EXPLETIVE] out of here!

And he gives his answer he does not support full abolition of the police.

(CHANTING) Go home, Jacob, go home! Go home, Jacob, go home!

And he turns around, and he just kind of walked off into the sea of people.

(CHANTING) Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame! Shame!

So after this event, there was already an event planned for the following day by some of these same activists organizations, in which they were going to bring council members who were supportive of their cause onto a stage in a park in the Southern part of the city. And they were going to try to get them to make a commitment to defunding the police.

So a lot like what they had done to the mayor?

Exactly.

Hi, Minneapolis. You look so beautiful today. Im Lisa Bender. Im the president of the Minneapolis City Council.

And so we had this gathering where there were hundreds of residents.

Our efforts at incremental reform have failed. Period.

And you had council members.

Our commitment is to do whats necessary to keep every single member of our community safe, and to tell the truth that the Minneapolis Police are not doing that. [CROWD CHEERS]

And you had nine of them who went up on the stage.

We are here today to begin the process of ending the Minneapolis Police Department. [CROWD CHEERS]

And then all nine of them each read a part pledging to defend the police.

All of us on this stage support this statement, and we stand with the people of Minneapolis in fighting for a safer community. [CROWD CHEERS]

The last council member, he basically said, and we are all committing to this pledge. And at that moment, it was like this emotional eruption.

[INAUDIBLE], get up, yall. We are transforming our city right now. Get up! get

You had white people, black people, Asian people, all putting their fists in the air, shouting, defund the police, defund police.

(CHANTING) Defund M.P.D.! Defund M.P.D.! Defund M.P.D.!

So just to be clear, this is not a vote, and not necessarily even a pledge to vote, but this is a public commitment to defund the police to do the very thing that the mayor, when asked, declined to agree to 24 hours before.

Yes, exactly. This is a pledge that they are going to defund the police. It is not a vote. It is not anything set in stone or written. But these are putting them all on record in front of many community members, saying that we are going to do this. And I even asked the activists about that. I said, weve heard politicians say things before and not keep those pledges. But this is something that they saw theyve been working on with them together in tandem. So I think theres a level of trust there that this pledge has really meant something. And you could see it in the reaction of the people who were there. They were really describing it as their Civil Rights Movement, their Voting Rights Act moment.

Wow. And John, can the members of the City Council who were in that park, making this pledge, do they have the actual authority to take away funding from the police department?

Yes, they absolutely have voting authority to do that. The council actually controls the police departments budget. And whats more significant about this moment is that because there were nine of them, those nine seats represents a veto-proof majority. So even if the mayor, Jacob Frey, does not want this to happen, if that coalition sticks together, they can do this on their own. And I think what were seeing is this sentiment is growing in traction in certain places. Like we already have in New York and Los Angeles, the mayors in both of those cities have already said that they are going to be redirecting funds that were intended for the police toward other parts of the city, toward other agencies in the city.

Im curious what the appetite for this kind of change to policing is, beyond the cities where there are largely Democratic city councils and mayors, and where this is now under discussion.

Thats a very key question, right? Were already seeing conservatives coming out against this and talking about this is as very radical leftist step to be taking. We see Donald Trump already tweeting about it. So certainly, this is something that, for conservative communities, something like this would be a tougher sell. And so again, policing is a very local thing. So what you experience and what the police force does or does not look like in Minneapolis is going to be very different than what it does or does not look like in Edina, which is just outside of Minneapolis, or any other suburb. So its going to be, in some ways, a patchwork of public safety, I think, if these things start happening around the country.

And I guess an open question is whether or not this has entered the mainstream, even of the Democratic Party. Just a few hours before you and I began to talk, Joe Biden came out and said he does not support defunding the police.

Yeah, this is certainly not something that is part of the mainstream or moderate Democratic platform. That said, you do get some people who might be in these more moderate spaces, you do get their attention and you do get their ear, is this sense that policing is not working which is just the basis of what these defund or abolish the police efforts are about, is that the system is not working. And so you will get even the more moderate folks to say that, to buy into that. And that may not result in them supporting a defund or abolishment, but will it support more stringent reforms, more significant reforms to police? So well see what happens.

I wonder how the activists that youre talking to see the challenge of explaining what these concepts are going to mean. Because in this moment, I think many Americans are really hearing these calls defund, dismantle, abolish for the first time. And they may be very wary of them, and they may see them as quite radical.

What the activists will tell you is that while it might sound radical for many Americans, this actually is not all that radical for a large section of this country.

What was your name, sir?

Yaazirah

How do you spell that?

Y-A-H-

If you go to black and brown communities like I went up to the North Side of Minneapolis and you talk to people about their experiences with the police there, it is not the experience of expecting an officer to come and help you. Its exactly the opposite. And I was speaking with a couple there, Amanda and Yaazirah Brazelton.

Its about time for a change.

A change, yeah.

Yeah. About time for a change.

And they were telling me that from a young age, essentially, they already had horrific experiences with the police.

[INAUDIBLE] I have police put guns in my face, you know, at seven years old, coming to my house with my mother and my father arguing, just regular argument that happens with a husband and wife.

Yaazirah, he was seven years old when the police came to his house when his parents were having an argument.

And they put guns in my face and put us all on the ground.

And then they stuck a gun in his face.

They traumatized me in childhood, so I was really against white police officers since.

And his wife Amanda, she was 14 when she was in a car with white people, and shes black.

Read the rest here:

Minneapolis Will Disband Its Police Force, Council Members Pledge - The New York Times

The movement to defund the police in the United States is gaining unprecedented momentum as protests continue across the globe. This week on Intercepted: Chenjerai Kumanyika, assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University, hosts a special two-part discussion. Kumanyika is co-host of the podcasts Uncivil and Scene on Radio. He is an organizer with 215 Peoples Alliance and the Debt Collective. He is joined for this episode of Intercepted bythe iconic geographer and abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, author of Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Gilmore is one of the worlds preeminent scholars on prisons and the machinery of carceral punishment and policing. In this discussion,she offers a sweeping and detailed analysis of the relentless expansion and funding ofpolice and prisons, and howlocking people in cages has become central to the American project. Gilmore offers a comprehensive road map for understanding how we have arrived at the present political moment of brutality and rebellion, andshe lays out the needfor prison abolition and defunding police forces.

A special thanks to Zeal & Ardor for the song, Devil is Fine.

[Devil is Fine by Zeal & Ardor plays.]

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: The thing that set in motion the events that resulted in Mr. Floyds brutal murder was that an employee at a convenience store thought that they had been handed a counterfeit bill. This young person I assume is young whos probably making minimum wage, who works for somebody who I understand to be a very decent human being who hires people in the community, a Palestinian American convenience store owner, did their job to keep their job. But we have to ask ourselves, why couldnt it be, they take this suspect looking bill, complete the transaction, and then deal with it afterward. Right? They had been deputized. Why is somebody working in a convenience store a deputy cop? This is a question.

[Music interlude.]

Jeremy Scahill: This is Intercepted.

[Music interlude.]

Chenjerai Kumanyika: Im Chenjerai Kumanyika. Im an assistant professor of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University. Im the co-host and creator of the Uncivil podcast, coming to you from my home in Philadelphia. Im taking over the show from Jeremy Scahill for this week, and this is episode 134 of Intercepted.

[Music interlude.]

Ruthie Wilson Gilmore: So many public agencies education, healthcare, and so forth have absorbed policing functions. Where, at the same time, many of the agencies of organized violence, such as jails and prisons and police, are absorbing social work functions, mental health care functions, things that they actually cant do.

CK: Thats our guest, geographer and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore. In part one of our two-part conversation, we speak about police killings, the Black Lives Matter movement, and abolition organizing, as police brutality in America has inspired a national uprising with global solidarity.

[Protest ambiance comes in: No justice, no peace, no racist police. No justice, no peace, no racist police. Dont shoot. Dont shoot.]

CK: As cases of Covid-19 continue to escalate, people across our entire country, from rural towns to major cities, are retaking the streets to rebel. Police and National Guard forces have responded with even more violence.

[Protest ambiance.]

CK: The killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis cops was another horrific and needless death, another unarmed Black man killed by police and recorded for all the world to see. It was another spectacle of violence at the hands of the state.

And weve seen this before. Like literally, weve seen it. Black men choked by police in broad daylight, uprisings against the carceral state police and prisons and pictures that prove that torture is going on in the institutions of criminal punishment. And we see the police are mostly not held accountable. They dont get fired. They dont get charged. And in the few cases where they do get charged, its extremely rare for them to be convicted.

But what is right before our eyes and on our cameras is not the entire picture of the change that needs to happen.

If we look off-camera and back just a little bit into history, we can see the conclusive failure of the kinds of reforms that established Democrats are proposing right now. Yes, use of force legislation is crucial. But remember, a judge found officer [Daniel] Pantaleo guilty of using a banned chokehold when he killed Eric Garner. Pantaleo is free today.

Also, as African-American studies professor Naomi Murakawa has pointed out, the concept of community policing was at the heart of the two largest crime reform legislative efforts of the 20th century. The first one was sponsored by Lyndon B. Johnson: the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Street Act, which created the Law Enforcement [Assistance] Administration. What did that result in? $10 billion was doled out to police departments, often in the name of improving police and community relations. This didnt mean treating people differently. It meant taxpayer money was spent on police public relations campaigns.

The second major criminal reform effort was the Clintons 1994 crime bill. This established the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services within the Justice Department. And what did that result in? $9 billion given to police departments over six years. And yet, here we are.

What we have to grapple with is this: These images are showing us a violence thats so clear, that weve stopped being able to see beyond it. The spectacle of violence is only the tip of the spear. Its only the most acute manifestation of a 150 years of racist state violence, punishing the poor, and failed reform. More training workshops for cops or another Black police chief is not going to fix this. Cops who kneel with protesters and then stand up and tear gas them is not going to fix this. What would it look like to try something else, to defund and dismantle police departments, and yes, to abolish the police? What would it look like to abolish prisons? And when I say abolish, what do I mean?

At this incendiary moment of crisis and possibility, we are deeply honored to hear from an experienced organizer and tremendous thinker on prisons, police, and how these systems of violence organize our lives, and what we must do about it.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Professor of Geography and Director of the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center, is co-founder of several abolitionist organizations including Critical Resistance. She is author of the prize-winning book, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California. Shes also finishing a couple of new books, including, Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition, forthcoming from Haymarket.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, welcome to Intercepted.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore: Thanks for having me on today. Im glad to be here.

CK: Ruth Wilson Gilmore shared a broad range of her thinking on the issues we are facing right now. But the first thing I was curious about was where she came from and who she was before she came to prison abolition.

RWG: Ruthie was a, and continues to be, the child and grandchild, and probably multiple generations of freedom fighters. We are Black people of the North. I grew up in a working-class household. My father was a tool and die maker. My mother worked as a lab technician. My fathers father was a janitor and a steward for a fraternity at Yale. My fathers mother was a seamstress and took laundry into her house. My other grandmother cleaned white peoples houses. This is, like, where I came from.

Everybody, every generation I know about fought for freedom. What was the freedom we fought for? My grandfather was one of the people who helped to organize the first blue-collar union at an Ivy League school. This was during World War II the double victory: victory against fascism abroad, victory against Jim Crow at home.

My father organized the machinists at Winchesters repeating firearms factory in the mid-1950s. Again, a labor struggle. He was also a leader in organizing for the well-being of the Black community of New Haven and, in so doing, made certain that all kinds of peoples lives would get better. So he was somebody who, long before Black Lives Matter, saw that when Black lives matter, everybody lives better. And hes kind of known in my hometown to this day tool and die maker became quite a fighter for freedom.

So thats who Ruthie was. I was raised by these people, in this tradition. Born 70 years ago, so in the waning years of Jim Crow, in 1950. So I came to an anti-capitalist position quite young, and I never left that.

I learned from reading and studying with people like Cedric Robinson, Stuart Hall, Angela Davis, Claudia Jones, so many people from around the world, how it is that we can make freedom out of what we have not by yielding or sacrificing some of our comrades but by trying to live the principle where life is precious, life is precious.

CK: Like so many other people, I opened Ruthies 2007 book Golden Gulag looking to understand why prisons and policing have become the answer to so many of societys problems. And why now? But in the books first pages, Ruthie gives us the image of a bus filled with people pulling onto a road.

RWG: First of all, Im a geographer. That is my discipline. And it might be interesting to listeners to understand that geographers dont make maps. Rather, we think about, we ask ourselves: Why do things happen where they do? Why do things happen where they do?

What I did in figuring out how to frame or introduce my book was to give the readers a sense of the expansive ground on which the prison industrial complex rose; to give the readers an understanding that there were urban and rural dimensions to it; to give the readers an understanding that there is a constant shift in the kinds of relationships people have with each other, with the means of production, with where they can and cant be in the world, and also how to struggle. And finally, I used that metaphor so that we could see, riding with those people in the bus, that there were so many different points of entry for various people to fight against the abandonment that had resulted in, among other things, mass incarceration, but also austerity, outsourcing, underemployment, environmental degradation, and the capture of the state government by those who are only ever enhancing the ability of the well-to-do to get richer.

CK: In the book, Ruthie describes the people on the bus as a dream crowd dream riders whose different entry points into struggle had to do with race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and religion. But they were drawn together by their sameness. As Ruthie puts it, they were employed, disabled, or retired working people with little or no discretionary income, whose goal was freedom for their relatives serving long sentences behind bars. This struck me as so much more sophisticated than some of our mainstream discussions about who has a stake in this fight and why.

RWG: My friend the fantastic historian, Darrell Scott, always warns against trying to summon outrage and political consciousness through appeals that result in pity or contempt. Instead, what we can see in following the story in my book and the empirical data that I use to make that book happen, and the ethnographic information that I managed to put together by working with people closely on the ground is this: as the Black Lives Matter people said so poignantly some years ago in the last uprisings, When Black lives matter, everybody lives better.

Now thats different from saying only Black people know what this suffering is. Rather, what we see in police killings, for example, in the United States, is that behind the sturdy curtain of racism that makes killing after killing after killing of Black people newsworthy, noteworthy, and yet not change anything, the police are killing lots of other people too. If we can stop the police from killing Black people, other people wont be killed. Because thats the killing thats so acceptable, continually is justified, and argued off as something police had no choice but to do.

So in my book, and in the research that I did, and in the political work that I have done in California, around the United States, and also internationally, I find that people can take from the multiple struggles that come together against police brutality, against police killings, against mass incarceration, against austerity, and imagine for themselves through their work how the struggle is class struggle, always, always, always.

CK: The knee jerk rejection of the concept of police and prison abolition by most mainstream politicians is based on the totally uninformed idea that what abolitionists are recommending is simply removing the police, de-carcerating, and letting the chips fall where they may. Of course, this is an incorrect and reductionist description. Instead, abolitionists have been the main ones calling attention to the relentless new investment in police and prisons.

U.S. Attorney General William Barr recently commented that he thinks calls to defund the police and reduce police budgets are dangerous. I asked Ruthie to talk about some of the weaknesses of the most popular explanations for the relentless expansion of the carceral state.

RWG: The first weakness is the one that says, well, the reason there are so many people in prison is crime. Do I, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, say there arent people who harm other people or people who engage in reprehensible acts? Of course, I dont, Im not a fool. I, like many abolitionists, came to abolition because we were tired of harm and we wanted to see something else happening in our communities and in the world. We didnt come idealistically thinking that there was no such thing as harm. Rather, we looked at the political category of crime and wanted to take it apart.

[Music interlude.]

The main reason that abolitionists in the movement dont use the word crime in a straightforward way is that its not a straightforward category. What gets lumped into that word, and certainly what appears in the front of peoples minds in their everyday common sense, people who are listening to us talk are immediately rushing to understand is: Why are they talking as though people dont hurt and rob other people? Thats what people think crime is.

So one question that we abolitionists ask ourselves is: What are the conditions under which it is more likely that people will resort to using violence and harm to solve problems? This is a question we ask ourselves. What can we do about it so that there is less harm? And one thing that we have learned is where life is precious, life is precious. So there are all kinds of people throughout the abolitionist world, in the United States and beyond who, for example, have tried to figure out how to reduce, if not completely do away with, the kinds of relationships that make people vulnerable to interpersonal violence, particularly of the domestic or intimate sort. So there is a huge amount of work on that. And I dont mean work that people have written up in esoteric academic journals. I mean the work that people do on the ground every day to keep themselves and their communities safe and well.

Two, the kinds of responses that the criminal system has put into effect over the last 40 years, approximately, has been to lengthen and lengthen and lengthen sentences, even though theres no evidence that a long sentence for one person who has committed some harm interrupts another person from committing some harm. Right? The only thing that we know seems to be the case is when the person who gets a long sentence is locked up, theyre not committing another harm on the outside. We dont know what theyre doing on the inside, but theyre not committing another harm on the outside. Thats a wordy way of saying: The purpose of locking people up today has pretty much been incapacitation. If youre locked up, you cant do what you were doing.

CK: Another reason to look critically at how the carceral state defines crime is the irrationality of the solutions that it presents us with. Ruthie says that incapacitation is one of four ways we are told that prisons will produce stability in our society. The other ways are through rehabilitation, deterrence, or retribution., But there is also another way that these systems of organized violence colonize more and more of our lives.

RWG: More and more kinds of behaviors some of it antisocial, some of it not has been criminalized over time. So thereve been new crimes added to the books, as well as extended sentences and sentence enhancements that is to say a sentence on top of the sentence for already existing wrongdoing.

So you put all of that together and then you can see how it is that in the United States crime went up, crime went down, but then they cracked down. That the rising prison lags behind the rise and fall of crime.

Thats another reason we dont talk about crime as much. What were trying to do is get people to understand the kinds of relationships that have normalized a sense that what prisons do is natural, normal, and inevitable.

CK: One way to dig even deeper into the category and meaning of crime is to look at it historically. When I asked Ruthie about this she told me about a place in New Jersey.

RWG: In fact, in the late 18th century, one of the first prisons built in the United States, the one in Trenton the oldest one in downtown Trenton, New Jersey, has etched in stone above the door: That those who are feared for their crime may learn fear of the law and be useful.

CK: One of the earliest American prisons claimed that it incarcerated people to make sure they were useful. But what did it mean to be useful for the masses of working people in the 18th century United States? To understand this, Ruthie takes us away from the United States.

RWG: So the middle of the 18th century is a time when in England, but not necessarily between and among English people, all kinds of workers were becoming disciplined to the wage. What does that mean? And this is what Ive learned from the fabulous historian Peter Linebaugh. What it means is that up until this time, workers compensation took the form of a mix of things. They would get some money pay the wage but also they could get some of the stuff that they were working with. So for example, a stevedore who took barrels of tobacco off a ship that had just arrived from the other side of the Atlantic could put the barrel down on the wharf, pry it open, take a handful of tobacco, put it in his pocket. And that would be part of his pay. That became outlawed because what the owners wanted to do was to make all workers accept only the money wage they got without any other kind of compensation. So then that meant also that people who worked building buildings could no longer take the bits of wood that they had sawed off home to do something else, whether it was warm their house or make something. Or people who worked making clothing in sewing shops couldnt take the remnants of fabric that they cut off the thing that they were making home to make their own things. The disciplining of those people to the wage was enforced by using the death penalty against the theft that they were convicted of theft of the tobacco, theft of the remnants of fabric. So Linebaugh, in his fabulous book The London Hanged, tells this story.

So we come up to the 19th century in the American project and we can use the kind of thinking that, you know, even Michel Foucault offered to us when he talked about how surveillance and punishment were key to the institutional infrastructure of control for what he called a society of strangers on the move, a society of strangers on the move.

So there is a disciplining intention to prisons. In the early days, sentences tended to be very short, as were lives. And we also know, if we follow very carefully, that unfree people were very rarely locked up. Unfree people who existed for their labor to be exploited, that is to say, African descended chattel slaves, were rarely locked up because it was not useful for those who owned the fruits of their labor to have them locked away. So prisons were for free people, generally white people, usually people who would check the box male if they had to check a box.

In the latter part of the 19th century, in the wake of the Civil War, as we know, prison expanded and rationalized in a number of ways in the South. We know about chain gangs, which were largely, but not exclusively, people of African descent. In the North and the South, both, all kinds of prisons grew up, around, and through these struggles over wage, over the right to live, the right to stay still, the right to move around. These were all contributing factors to the expansion and rationalization of prison in the United States so that by the end of the 19th century, under the capital P Progressive Movement, we saw institutions arising that regularized prisons for men, prisons for children, women, things that hadnt existed quite so starkly before as part of the expansion of large-scale governmental institutions that were designed by Progressive Era people to guarantee the ability to extract value from labor and land, right? Thats what the Progressive Era was all about, in my view. So Khalil Muhammad has written about this, Estelle Freedman a lot of people have written fantastically about the distinctions and the differentiations that shaped the Progressive Era Nayan Shah, so many people have written really fine work.

CK: Lets be clear. Police and other systems of organized violence do not arise out of any concern for public safety. Instead, these institutions became fixtures in our society so that the powerful could guarantee their right to exploit labor and enforce social hierarchy as modern society became more complex. But Ruthie says we cant fully understand why so many people are in cages today without also exploring the geography of divestment.

RWG: In the United States, where organized abandonment has happened throughout the country, in urban and rural contexts, for more than 40 years, we see that as people have lost the ability to keep their individual selves, their households, and their communities together with adequate income, clean water, reasonable air, reliable shelter, and transportation and communication infrastructure, as those things have gone away, whats risen up in the crevices of this cracked foundation of security has been policing and prison.

Now its not that surprising when we stop and think that if in an organized way, state and capital abandon people, something is going to arise to shape and direct what those people do who are not absorbed back into the political economy in other ways. Its really not that surprising, though it is frightening.

[Music interlude.]

So if we look then more specifically at what has happened in state and municipal budgets, we see the expansion of budgets devoted to mass incarceration, to jails, and to police. We see not only that but, in agencies that are supposed to be working toward other ends education, health, and so forth a rise in police functions.

One thing that we see happening, for example, is that police in schools has spread across the United States in this period. Or we can look at something as relatively technical and one would imagine benign as a student financial aid, and we see that student financial aid officers in colleges and universities have a policing function as well. Or the fact that the United States Department of Education has a SWAT team. So we see that the policing function has risen not only in the traditional agencies of the police, that is to say, police jail in prison, but also in social welfare agencies. And so its that twinned growth that shows us that weve been so thoroughly abandoned that we have to take back, we have to take back, which is to change, transform, and move to something new.

CK: As government and corporate leaders across the United States facilitate divestment that is sanitized in the deceptive language of cost-savings and shared sacrifice, Ruthie understands why some communities also begin to look to prisons for other reasons.

California Assemblyman Jim Costa used these false promises about prisons as a way to supercharge his political career. He put three prisons in his district in the 1980s and sponsored three more in the 1990s. Ruthie describes this by saying that he climbed the punishment ladder into the California State Senate.

RWG: When we were fighting for many, many years to stop California from building and opening its, I think it would have been the 24th new prison it would have constructed and opened over about a 23-year period, we did enormous outreach to the city of Delano, the town where that prison was to have been built.

CK: Delano provided a stark example of the difference in priorities between two different kinds of solutions. Costa responded to unemployment with the promise of jobs which would ostensibly be created by locking people in cages. Another solution, grounded in Delanos history, responded to exploitation with solidarity and collective struggle.

RWG: Delano is a central place in the imagination of agricultural workers throughout the United States because its where the headquarters of the United Farm Workers was. The United Farm Workers that came out of organizing, that was mostly dominated in the early days by Filipino migrant workers, but eventually became strongly associated with Mexican-American which is to say Chicano workers and Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta are the names most strongly associated with that organization, that union, and that movement.

The UFWs headquarters was at a place in Delano called Forty Acres. Why was it called Forty Acres?

Forty Acres was named in solidarity and honor with the agricultural workers of the U.S. South, the freed people, to whom General Sherman had in his field order promised they would be granted 40 acres and a mule so that they could be self-sufficient in the wake of the U.S. Civil War.

So imagine this: in the small place, small town, city of Delano, there was already one mega-prison thousands of people a small prison with about 500, and the plan for a new mega-prison designed for 5,160 people slated to be built.

I did research combed through every possible document to try to figure out how many of the projected 1,800 jobs would likely go to residents of the city of Delano and the biggest number I could come up with was 72, out of 1,800 jobs. Seventy-two. So I told a reporter for the New York Times, a woman called Evelyn Nieves, what I had found in my research, and she repeated this to the then-mayor of Delano. This was 20 years ago. She repeated what I had said to him. And he said, well, you gotta understand, things here are so bad, I cannot, as the mayor of this town, say we dont need those 72 jobs.

Some people tried to tell us that this was peculiar somehow to California and other places, towns, and other parts of the United States were, just, benefiting enormously by having lockups in their communities.

But the more that I and some of my colleagues and comrades studied the problem, going to places like North Carolina and Minnesota and Pennsylvania, to Texas and Oklahoma, to Oregon and beyond was: It wasnt true. It wasnt true that the lockups provided what people wanted, even if the lockups provided something that people were afraid of letting go. Those are two different things.

Thats what organized abandonment has done to our political imagination, to our expectation of what kinds of opportunities and protection should be available and accessible to people, modestly educated people in the prime of life. Modestly educated people in the prime of life are the people who are locked in prison and they are the people who work in prison. They are two sides of the same coin: those who have suffered organized abandonment and those who labor in the area of organized violence to keep steady the otherwise explosive conditions that people are living through.

And that kind of brings us to today. Nobody predicted the pandemic. I mean, in general, people like Mike Davis say, its coming, its coming. But nobody knew that eventually something was going to happen that would unsettle all of the uneasy relations between and among people who experience abandonment and those whose job it is to control the effects of that abandonment until the pandemic. And I do think its that objective condition the condition of people having been told to stay home; the condition of at least 20 percent unemployment, which means its higher throughout the United States; people tired of the ongoing, relentless assaults on people going about their everyday lives by police; sick of police killings, sick, sick, sick that has produced the conditions that caused us to be invited by Jeremy Scahill to have this conversation.

CK: That was Ruth Wilson Gilmore in this special episode of Intercepted. Well get back to the interview in a moment, but first I wanted to take some time for a grounding exercise. A grounding exercise is a technique that helps us to use our five senses to become present and move through states of distress or mounting anxiety. The following poem, by Greensboro artist and organizer Demetrius Noble, is entitled Poverty, Policing, Pandemic: A #BlackLivesMatter Grounding Exercise.

Demetrius Noble: In hell. Smell that righteous rage permeating from police precincts, propane with protests. I know were in the middle of a pandemic but I need you to pull your face mask down and smell the swell of 100,000 yells. No justice, no peace!

You can literally smell the fire of our legitimate political desires whenever wind blows. You try to hide inside but the revolutionary aroma rode in through busted windows. They found some rich rappin negroes to denigrate the dark denizens who dared to remind Atlantas Black mayor that they too are citizens and are tired of living in poverty in the city that leads the nation in income inequality.

With Black Lives Matter on their minds and a radical inflection point within reach, these outcasts hit the streets and told Mayor Bottoms, Fuck your New Atlanta Compromise speech.

In hell. Can you smell the fear of orange monsters cringing in bunkers? See the actions of neo-fascists dispatching troops on unruly youngsters. Tear gassing our children cause they have the audacity to believe that another world is possible and wont stop until its achieved. Smell the winds of change riding in on this new breeze. Not even your offensive line can block freedoms fragrance, Drew Brees.

See established budgets crumbling from our rumblings as we demand: Defund the police! See charges being filed as brilliant red fires glow. Hear the chant Black lives matter! as global protests grow. Hear essential workers on a picket line scream, No, we wont go! Feel this mighty movement from below. Witness that this powder keg is about to blow.

Take off your face mask, open your mouth and belt suppressed screams in hell and smell the citys on fire til you taste the kerosene.

Say their names until you can taste our pain, then join us on the frontlines as we struggle for change. Dont let these embers cool, youngun. Feed the flames .

CK: [Sigh.] Last week, after police officers in Minneapolis were charged, some people wondered why protestors and organizers were still in the streets. Of course, many different kinds of folks are in the streets for many different reasons. Princeton professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor has pointed out that although Black folks are oppressed in many different areas of our lives, such as housing, healthcare, food security, police brutality and state violence are consistently the match that lights the fire of broader rebellion.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore takes up similar issues as she discusses the events leading up to the Watts rebellion in 1965.

RWG: From the mid-1960s until now, if we look at, kind of, grand indicators, one of the things that we see is a decline in union membership in the manufacturing trades. In public-sector unions, a little bit less so. And in fact, a certain amount of success up until the early nineties. We see that, at the moment that the Civil Rights movement or what some of us like to call Second Reconstruction was reaching its apogee with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 64 and 65 both of which the current United States Supreme court is gutting we see that the economic well-being already of vulnerable communities in urban and rural contexts were already under fire.

In the Watts context, I do not dispute that people came out in the streets because one too many people had been dragged out of his car and brutalized by the cops in Watts. That is true. But it is also true that Watts was already experiencing Watts writ large was already experiencing what became much more the norm 10 years later, which is what I have been terming, the organized abandonment of vulnerable communities. That jobs were leaving, that protections were leaving, that opportunities for advancement and protections from calamity were going away.

So in the early, mid-1970s, we see in the long wind-down of the Vietnam War, in the big build-up of law and order under Nixon, before Nixons own lawbreaking ran him out of office, we see what the political economists Bennett Harrison and Barry Bluestone called the great U-turn. And the great U-turn is the turn away from expanded unionization, expanded jobs, benefits, workplace protections, and the removal, bit by bit, of especially, but not exclusively, manufacturing jobs from high wage, high union states in the United States to either low wage right to work states or overseas. And both of those movements happen, and they call that the great U-turn.

So the Watts riots was an expression of frustration and abandonment. And at the same time I want to talk about schools for a moment the school discipline policy in Los Angeles had shifted quite dramatically from what it had been up until the passage of Brown v. Board of Education in the mid-fifties, in which school principals decided on discipline and suspension, much less expulsion, were very rare to a centralized school discipline policy that required suspension and expulsion. Required it.

So there were all kinds of destabilization of already struggling communities throughout the levels of age, education, and so forth, including school discipline policies that then, you know, resulted in young peoples frustration with every aspect of their lives, short-term and perspective as well.

CK: The multifaceted rebellions that explode from long histories of exploitation and domestic colonialism raise an important issue. As Cathy Cohen put it in a recent episode of The Dig podcast, What does justice for George Floyd really mean? Ruthie offered some insight into that question.

RWG: The last story I want to leave you with is a story of the amazing late great Michael Zinzun, who was a member of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense who fought against cops and cop brutality throughout Southern California, where he was quite the organizer and political leader. Michael Zinzun in a brutal attack on him by, I think it was Pasadena police force, lost an eye and quite amazingly, in those days, he brought suit and was compensated for this harm that happened to him.

And he took those resources and founded an organization that he then ran through the rest of his life: the Coalition Against Police Abuse, CAPA. Now running the coalition out of a little tiny office with uncomfortable folding chairs in South Central L.A., Michael paid attention to all of the things that were going on around him. He didnt only look at the cops. He asked himself questions that I asked myself and Ive been encouraging people who are listening to us today to ask themselves: What is it that makes peoples lives vulnerable? What is it that makes peoples lives vulnerable? And as you might know, I, Ruthie, have defined racism as the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. Its a mouthful, but Im going to make it clear in the next few minutes.

Michael Zinzun thought very hard about the fact that so many young people who are growing up in housing projects in Los Angeles were suffering from really bad asthma very bad asthma. And in fact, kids were dying of asthma. Nobody should die of asthma. Its eminently treatable, and they were suffering and dying of asthma. And so he looked into what it was that was creating the conditions for such relentless rates of asthma in the public housing projects and in regions of low income, working-class people in Southern California. And he saw that one of the problems that people were facing was that since the maintenance of that public housing was so dismal, the incidence of vermin infestation mice, rats, and roaches, and also mold was creating it, literally, an atmosphere conducive to asthma because of the roach droppings, mouse droppings, and the occasional or regular use of pesticides to deal with roaches, that all of this was contributing to the incidence of asthma.

That means that Michael Zinzun became an environmental justice activist because he was an anti-police activist, right? He was against the police because police were shortening lives. He became an environmental justice activist because the environment within the living spaces for these young people was literally killing them. And so he became, as it were, a model for what I imagine abolition to be today.

[Music interlude.]

That is to say, abolition has to be green. It has to take seriously the problem of environmental harm, environmental racism, and environmental degradation. To be green it has to be red. It has to figure out ways to generalize the resources needed for well-being for the most vulnerable people in our community, which then will extend to all people. And to do that, to be green and red, it has to be international. It has to stretch across borders so that we can consolidate our strength, our experience, and our vision for a better world. So thats what I came to say to you about abolition today.

CK: Whoo! Oh my god. Thank you, Ruth Wilson Gilmore.

RWG: Its great to have been in conversation with you today.

Read the rest here:

Intercepted Podcast: Ruth Wilson Gilmore on Abolition - The Intercept

In the wake of global protests over the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, a movement to redirect public resources away from traditional policing and toward community-oriented systems of public safety has taken hold around the country. What are advocates of defunding the police really arguing for, and could it work? Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors joins Mehdi Hasan to discuss the future of policing in the United States.

Patrisse Cullors: Much of what the police do now are things that social workers can do, things that case managers can do, things that other governmental workers can do. And thats why our movement is calling to defund them.

[Musical interlude.]

Mehdi Hasan: Welcome to Deconstructed. Im Mehdi Hasan.

When you see, week after week, police officers beating unarmed protesters, reporters, passers-by an elderly man with cancer, in broad daylight, on camera you have to ask: What is the solution? Surely reforming the police isnt enough?

PC: Defunding the police means were actually resourcing communities with access to healthcare, access to adequate public education, and access to jobs.

MH: Thats my guest today Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter and Reform LA Jails.

So, is it time to defund the police? And how would that even work?

Last Saturday I watched a video of one of the most remarkable scenes involving an elected politician and their constituents that Ive witnessed in my adult lifetime.

Jacob Frey, mayor of Minneapolis the city where it all kicked off, where George Floyd was so brutally killed by the police Jacob Frey, a young, liberal Democrat, a former civil rights lawyer, turned up to to join a protest against police brutality and show solidarity with his black constituents. But it didnt go so well for him when he was asked in front of the entire crowd, by the organizers, whether he was willing to go beyond the usual platitudes about police reform.

Kandace Montgomery: Jacob Frey, we have a yes-or-no question for you. Yes or no: Will you commit to defunding the Minneapolis Police Department?

Mayor Jacob Frey: Abolition of it?

KM: What did I say?

[Crowd starts reacting to Jacob.]

Kandace Montgomery: We dont want no more police. Is that clear? We dont want people with guns toting around in our community, shooting us down. You have the answer? It is the yes or a no. It is a yes or a no. Will you defund the Minneapolis Police Department?

[Crowd shushes.]

KM: Alright, be quiet yall. Be quiet, because its its important that we actually hear this. Its important that we hear this because if yall dont know, hes up for re-election next year.

[Crowd cheers and boos.]

KM: And if he says no, guess what the fuck we gonna do next year?

[Crowd cheers, and folks say, Louder! to Jacob Frey.]

JF: I do not support the full abolition of the police.

[Crowd boos and shouts.]

KM: Alright, youre wasting our time. Get the fuck out of here. Get the fuck out of here. [chanting] Go home Jacob go home! Go home Jacob go home! Go home Jacob go home!

MH: Talk about a walk of shame.

Now you might say, Well, what does that achieve? Yeah, they booed and humiliated the mayor, a white Democrat, but they cant actually get politicians to do what they want. These protestors are all talk theyre all protest.

Erm, not quite. At least, not this time! The very next day, on Sunday, nine members of the Minneapolis City Council a veto-proof majority, by the way pledged to dismantle the police department, saying it was beyond reform.

Newscaster: Some breaking news coming in tonight, the Minneapolis City Council has announced their intent to disband the police department.

Reporter: Thats right Tom.

Speaker: Our commitment is to end our citys toxic relationship with the Minneapolis Police Department. To end policing as we know it.

Reporter: Minneapolis City Council members admit they dont have the answers about what a police-free future looks like. They have said they want to defund police, and invest in things like juvenile crime prevention programs, and rely more on social workers, and calling 311 versus 911.

MH: Its a big move. Its massive. The Minneapolis City Councillors, though, offered no details on how theyre going to defund, dismantle, disband and, presumably, replace the police in their city. And so one of the things I want to explore with my guest today is what it means to dismantle a police department practically, what it means to call for the defunding of the police a call were now hearing more and more, and not just from Black Lives Matter protesters in the streets but even on the op-ed pages of the New York Times. Less than two weeks ago, this was the headline in the Times opinion section: No More Money for the Police, with the subhead: Redirect it to emergency response programs that dont kill black people.

Hear, hear!

The amount of money that is spent on policing in this country is stunning. Just astonishing. $115 billion nationwide; its tripled over the past 40 years, even as crime has fallen. The New York Police Department, the NYPD, whose finest weve seen beating innocent unarmed New Yorkers on the streets in recent weeks on camera, on tape has the biggest police budget in the country, $6 billion, which is more than the citys Departments of Health, Homeless Services, Youth Services, and Employment Services combined combined! Its bigger than the World Health Organizations budget. Bigger than the GDP of 50 countries around the world. Defunding that budget shouldnt be a priority for those of us who give a damn about social justice, racial equality, human rights? Really?

And defunding doesnt mean you just shut everything down and cut them all off. Abolish the police doesnt mean you just get rid of it and leave behind no replacement.

Camden, New Jersey, used to be one of the most violent cities in the U.S.. In 2012, the city dissolved its corrupt police department and replaced it with a new community-oriented model and lots of new personnel. Listen to the former Camden County Police Chief Scott Thompson, speaking on MSNBC:

Scott Thompson: In 2012, every member of the Camden City Police Department, including myself, was fired. I was a police officer 20 years, been a police chief for five. Myself and everyone else had to had to fill out a 50-page application, interview, the whole nine yards.

We were all new employees. We started over. We created a new police force. We created a police force where the philosophy was going to be the empowerment of the community before enforcement of the law. We would bring on every member of the organization, and we wanted them to identify more as a member of the Peace Corps than being a special forces operator, and that we would reclaim these city streets, in a manner in which we were empowering the people, so that they would be able to reclaim it, as opposed to us militarizing the neighborhoods and thereby polarizing the community even further.

MH: And guess what happened? Murders fell by more than 70 percent, violent crimes by more than 40 percent.

Its not just former police chiefs like Scott Thompson making the case, by the way. On Monday, San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said he was open to the idea of defunding the police. The police chief himself!

Still, lets be honest, its going to be an uphill battle to get people behind the idea of defunding, let alone, abolishing the police if such a thing is even possible, nationwide. Polls suggest that big majorities of Americans support protests against police brutality and believe police forces need to change. But only a minority of Americans want to cut police budgets.

Then youve got the white nationalist in the White House, who is of course on record encouraging police to be violent:

President Donald J. Trump: When you see these thugs being thrown into the back of a paddy wagon, you just see them thrown in, rough. I said, Please dont be too nice. [Audience laughter.] Like when you guys put somebody in the car, and youre protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over like, dont hit their head, and theyve just killed somebody, dont hit their head. I said, You can take the hand away, OK? [Audience laughs, cheers, and applauds.]

MH: This week, Trump was quick to jump to the defense of the police, and against the crazy, left-wing, radical idea of defunding.

DJT: There wont be defunding, there wont be dismantling of our police. And, uh, there wont be any disbanding of our police. Our police have been letting us live in peace, and we want to make sure we dont have any bad actors in there, and sometimes youll see some horrible things, like we witnessed recently, but 99 I say 99.9, but lets go with 99 percent of them are great, great people.

MH: Then theres the Democratic presidential candidate, Joe Biden, speaking to Norah ODonnell on CBS News this week:

Norah ODonnell: Do you support defunding the police?

Joe Biden: No, I dont support defunding the police.

MH: To be fair to Biden, though he was also very explicit in that interview on the issue of systemic police racism:

NO: Do you believe there is systemic racism in law enforcement?

JB: Absolutely. But its not just law enforcement its across the board. Its in housing, and its in education, and its in everything we do. Its real, its genuine, its serious.

MH: And, look, despite his awful record on criminal justice issues, he now has a criminal justice reform agenda that is far, far superior to anything on offer from Trump and the Republicans, that contains many good ideas and decent policy proposals for restraining the police and holding them accountable.

So, its a start. But it doesnt go far enough. Like so many liberals, Biden still seems unwilling unable even to take the kind of radical steps that this radical, historic moment demands. He needs to be pushed even more.

And you know, some of this stuff shouldnt even be considered that radical. What Americans often call radical is just normal to the rest of the world. For example, universal healthcare: its not a radical idea outside of the United States.

Id say the same thing about policing. Im from the UK, a country with a very similar political culture to the U.S., many similarities between the two countries; the UK thats been governed by conservatives for the majority of the past 100 years, and yet the police in the UK tend to be unarmed. Almost all the UK police dont carry weapons.

In 2018, U.S. police shot dead more than a 1000 people; UK police shot dead 3 people. Its not just the UK; Ireland, Iceland, Norway, New Zealand, all have unarmed police forces.

Now, Im not saying that U.S. police officers should all give up their weapons overnight especially in a country as heavily-armed, as full of guns, as this one. But my point is that we need to understand that it is possible to do policing a different way. There are international examples of better practice. Hell, as I mentioned earlier, there are local examples of better practice for example, Camden, New Jersey.

But there is this ongoing failure of imagination among liberals, and on parts of the Left, too, encouraged by cynical conservatives who say big change radical change, so-called is unrealistic, is impossible.

The irony is that events are proving them wrong events are moving so fast. Just 12 weeks ago, the architect of New Yorks racist stop-and-frisk policing policy was polling second nationwide in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. Can you imagine that today? Michael Bloomberg as a potential Democratic front runner? Ha!

Things change, so dont let people tell you that justice cant be done, that change cant come, that the status quo must persist.

Things can change, will change, have to change. They are changing. The question is: How far can change go, and what can you and I do to make sure we keep pushing, we keep fighting, for a new vision, a new way of policing, a new system of justice?

Im reminded of that old quote, often misattributed to Gandhi, but which seems very appropriate for the political moment were in right now: First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

[Musical interlude.]

MH: My guest today is a fighter; a long-standing campaigner for social justice and human rights, and the co-founder of Black Lives Matter. Patrisse Cullors is also the Founder of Reform LA Jails and author of the acclaimed book, When They Call You a Terrorist: A Black Lives Matter Memoir.

She joins me now from LA.

MH: Patrisse, thanks for joining me on Deconstructed. Lets get straight to it: What does defund the police mean, in practice, in the real world?

PC: Defunding the police means that were actually resourcing communities, like black, poor communities with access to health care, access to adequate public education, and access to jobs. Much of what the police do right now are things that social workers can do, things that case managers can do, things that other governmental workers can do. And thats why our movement is calling to defund them.

MH: Is there a difference, Patrisse, between defunding the police and abolishing the police because weve heard both slogans in recent weeks, and sometimes they sound interchangeable, but sometimes they dont?

PC: Sure. Some people believe in the defund demand because it means that well keep police at some capacity. And some people believe that the defund demand is our pathway towards abolition.

So they are two different demands, depending on your philosophies. Im an abolitionist, so I believe that the first step to abolition is defunding both the police system, but also the carceral system, which is the system that has created mass incarceration.

MH: So, a lot of liberals listening to this will say: Were totally onboard with the idea that the police are out of control, that institutional racism is a problem, but defunding the police, abolishing the police, those are steps too far, we want reform. What do you say to them? Whats wrong with police reform?

PC: Well, what I say to people is, and when we say defunding the police, were not saying stop having people be accountable to issues of harm and violence. This is not a conversation about lack of accountability. This is a conversation about building in a new system of accountability, one that is based on an economy of care over an economy of punishment.

Right now, we have a system that is punitive, that is based on punishing human beings. And that is cruel and evil. The system that were asking for is a compassionate and loving system, and that is able to still hold people accountable for harm that they cause. That is totally in alignment with people who believe in defunding, and also with people who believe in abolition.

MH: But reform, you believe the police we have to go beyond reform, reforms not enough reform, doesnt work? Whats your position on reform?

PC: I think it depends on the kind of reform.

When I talk about reform, Im thinking about non-reformist reform, which is my work is about decreasing the polices ability to be in contact with black people. And so whatever demands that Im making, or the organizations that I work with are making, is always about how do we lessen the burden of police on black communities?

So a reform can be reform like body cameras. Does that change the structural violence and racism inside of police departments? No, actually, it has not changed it at all. Instead, body cameras are just showing us more and more the dysfunctionality of policing.

And so, the other reform that were calling for because defunding the police is a reform, but its the reform that isnt giving the police state more money.

MH: The immediate response from a lot of people in recent days, including people of color, to this idea of defunding or abolishing the police is: What happens if Im in trouble? What happens if I am facing a violent or dangerous person? Who do I call?

PC: Hopefully, we can build new institutions that people can have a new place to call. If its 911, then hopefully, someones in a mental health crisis, you can call 911. And instead of them sending a police officer who may kill the person whos in that mental health crisis, you call someone like a caseworker or a psychiatrist whos been trained to de-escalate an issue.

The problem is, oftentimes when police do show up, more violence happens. It doesnt make it less violent when the police are involved. And thats very important for people to understand.

MH: I totally get that and your example of the mental health situation is a very good one. But then of course, there are always the extreme examples that are used to make the other side of the argument. So if youre in an armed robbery, youre an owner of a gas station and people are men with guns or trying to rob you. You want armed police to turn up and protect you, dont you?

PC: Depends. Once again, weve seen many of examples where people have been armed, and theres been on video where other people have de-escalated them. An eye for an eye is not actually a true response if were trying to get harm reduction.

What weve seen across neighborhoods in places where theres a significant amount of harm and violence is when you have policing as the only answer, it creates more harm and violence.

And so the answer is really in institutions that are based in community care, institutions that are working with the community to try to deal with the violence instead of use the police to cause more violence.

I think the other thing is, we have a myth about what the police do. So I think its important for listeners to understand none of us understand what a beat cop does, because what we watch on TV is that they solve murders and rapes; violent crime is only one to five percent. So what a beat cop does is mostly about dealing with poverty. Thats what a beat cop does, and I think its really, really important that we start to investigate how we understand policing, and the propaganda that weve been, you know, shoved down our throats around policing.

MH: So youre making the case for doing this very eloquently in terms of describing the status quo being broken.

In Minneapolis, theyve said that they want to disband the police department, come up with something better, reimagine it, but they havent really said what it is that theyre going to do theyve admitted it cant be done overnight. Its going to take a year.

Now, many people would say the devil is in the details. Saying defund the police or abolish the police, thats easy. Doing it, executing that vision is much harder. Would you concede that?

PC: Yes, it is. Its much harder because every single institution we are a part of us as law enforcement: our schools our public schools, our public hospitals, our public parks, every single institution relies on law enforcement. And so it means that we have to reimagine entirely new systems.

The good news is, is there are many people across this country and the world who have been thinking about this for a very long time; they have ideas about what those new systems can be? Theyve tried it in small theyve beta tested it in small areas, in small neighborhoods. So its not like people have to learn from scratch. Its just not popular. This is the first time in modern history where abolitionism and this concept of defunding the police is a popular moment.

I often think about what it must have felt like when black folks were abolishing slavery and they finally got the word that they were moving towards abolition. I mean, thats the moment that were in. And its very powerful.

MH: But are you comparing the police to slave owners, though anyway, many people would say that, thats a comparison thats not fair.

PC: No, Im comparing the police to patrols, slave patrols, which is what they were originally, they were created so they could go catch enslaved Africans who were fleeing for freedom. Thats the role of the police; thats the role that theyve always played. So they werent the slave owners, but they worked on behalf of them.

MH: Thats a very good point. Youre in LA, where Democratic mayor Eric Garcetti has agreed to cut the LAPD budget by $100 million, I think, and divert some of that money towards communities of color. Do steps like that, incremental steps, modest steps, do they count, in your view, towards defunding the police? Or is it all or nothing in your view? It has to look like Minneapolis, or like Camden, New Jersey?

PC: No, its an important step, but it is a far, far cry from what weve asked for. LAPDs budget is $3 billion; $150 million is nothing. So we need to continue to cut at that budget. And I think its incredibly important that we remember that $150 million doesnt mean that the budget isnt still more than half of the city budget.

MH: So you talked about your asks and the progress. Youre a co-founder of Black Lives Matter. Theres been a remarkable change in public attitudes driven by Black Lives Matter protesters and others over the years.

I was just looking at the polling after Ferguson in 2014. The proportion of Republicans who said the killing of unarmed African-American men by the police was a reflection of broader problems with the police thats doubled from 19 percent in 2014 to 47 percent, almost half of Republicans today. Across all Americans, its a massive 69 percent who say there are broader problems with the polices treatment of black men.

Do those numbers surprise you? Shock you? I mean, Im sure they make you happy, but how surprised are you at the change were seeing? Is it quick enough for you?

PC: Im pretty surprised, actually. Grateful. But yes, surprised. I feel like we remember being called terrorist, and remember people believing it across the country and across the globe. And so to see that shift is profound, and it means that whatever we have been doing, its working.

See more here:

Deconstructed Podcast: Is It Time to Defund the Police? - The Intercept

Protesters in the English town of Bristol have reignited a fierce debate over the role of statuary in public spaces afterthey toppled a monument celebrating Edward Colston, a board member of the Royal African Company, the biggest slave-trading firm in British history, as one of the citys most virtuous and wisest sons.

The statue was toppled and dumped into a harbor on June 7 after theBristol City Council spent years equivocating over the wording of a plaque proposed in 2018 that would clarify Colstons links to the slave trade.The statue was erected in 1895, more than 150 years after his death, and 88 years after Britain abolished the slave trade, to commemorate the gifting of his vast fortune to the city of Bristol.

Adding plaques and new wording to contextualize problematic statues has been a common method of dealing with Confederate monuments in the US,but in the UK, disputes over wording can drag on without closure. Oxford Universityhas reviewed several such proposed plaques for its controversial statue of the Victorian Imperialist Cecil Rhodes, but none have yet been approved.

Moreover, some opponents of these measures are dissatisfied with the sanitizing language that is often used to contextualize monuments, which they say does not do enough to inspire people to think differently about historical legacies.

Protesters transporting the statue of Colston towards the river Avon. Photo by Giulia Spadafora/NurPhoto via Getty Images.

In Bristol, demonstrators took matters into their own hands, and activist groups around the UK are noworganizing to topple more monuments, even as officials in some cities have begun to voluntarily remove them on their own.

Now the question is: what comes next?

Some have called for the Colston statue to remain in the habor. (As the historian David Olusoga recently pointed out, the water burial is somewhat poetic, given that many of the victims of Colstons enterprise drowned in the Middle Passage.) But the Bristol City Council has other plans, and has already fished the monument out of the water(but not before someone updated its location on Google Maps). The statue is now in secure storage and will be added to the citys museums collection, although the council has given no indication of where or how it will be displayed.

I dont believe that you can erase history. Its more dangerous to erase history, the artist Yinka Shonibare tells Artnet News, adding that he feels the most appropriate setting for the felled monument is in a museum.

If the community wants [monuments] to be removed, then they should be removed, but they should remain in public view, by creating museums for them, as a reminder so that we dont make the same mistakes in the future, Shonibare says.

Similarly, the director of the Victoria & Albert MuseumsV&A East Project,Gus Casely-Hayford,says theremoval of the sculpture presents an opportunity for Bristol to confront the issue head on.I could see the statue in its present state along with placards from the march as the culmination of a wider exploration of slavery and race at one of the citys museums, he says. (Theartist Hew Locke suggests that the work could be installed in a museum on its side, not resurrected up like an attractive statue.)

But others say that statues like these cannot be properly contextualized in existing museum collections, which have their own alreadyentrenched hierarchies of knowledge, and have called for these monuments to be displayed on their own.

I think that there should be a real Museum of Colonization, like there is a museum of the Holocaust ,so that people can reflect on that colonial fact,says the Belgian historian Omar Ba.

The now-empty Edward Colston statue plinth. Photo by Matthew Horwood/Getty Images.

As for what to do with the empty plinth, nearly 45,000 people have signed a petition asking that it be used to memorialize a local civil-rights leader, Paul Stephenson, who led the 1963 Bristol Bus Boycott, which began after local transportation authorities refused to employ Black or Asian bus crews. His actions influenced the creation of the 1965 Race Relations Act,the first piece of legislation in the UK to outlaw racial discrimination.

Another suggestion, put forward by theLondon-based sculptor Sokari Douglas Camp, is to install in the space a permanent artwork commemorating the abolition of slavery. (Her work,All the world is now richer, which commemorates the end of slavery and salutes survivors of its legacy, was shown in Bristol Cathedral over the burial site of a number of slavers in 2013.)

But there is a glass ceiling when proposals like this are brought forward, Douglas Camp says. This time of change is an opportunity to site the work on the Edward Colston site, if Bristolians are willing.

But not everyone agrees that the statue of Colston should be permanently removed. Hew Locke, who has beenreimagining public sculptures of problematic historic figures in his work since the 1980s, suggests that an artist be commissioned to make apermanent intervention on the statue itself.

Insulting the statue means that you walk past it every day and you dont ignore it anymore, he says.

Hew Locke, Colston (RESTORATION series)(2006). Image courtesy the Artist, Hales Gallery and PPOW. Hew Locke. All Rights Reserved, DACS 2020.

An alternative solution would be to restore the statue alongside a counter monument with equivalent presence and power, to really ignite a conversation, and to show opposition, Ba says.

In fact, the Bristol-born street artist Banksy has put forward his own proposal on Instagram for how to deal with the monument, suggesting that it be reinstalled with the addition of bronze figures of protesters in the act of pulling him down. Its a solution thatworks for both those who miss the Colston statue and those who dont, Banksy wrote.

But artist Heather Phillipson, whose work is about to be installed on Londons Fourth Plinth, counters that it may be best for white artists to step aside.

I think its time for white people to listen and make space, she says. And this may just be the perfect opportunity to, literally, do that.

Shot of Ibrahim Mahama, Silent Recreations, Mark Rietveld, courtesy Extra City.

Whatever solution is decided upon, how the decision gets madeand what lasting policy changes are put in placeis just as important as what the decisions are.

In 2018,curators Antonia Alampi and iLiana Fokianaki of Kunsthal Extra City in Antwerp worked with Ba and the artist Ibrahim Mahamato imagine a potential counter-monumentto a local statue of the colonial missionary and explorer Constant de Deken standing with one of his knees on the back of an enslaved African person (people are now campaigning to remove this sculpture).

But the pair ended upresigning from their jobs a year into the project, saying that the museum had failed toimplement serious anti-racist policies beyond its programming schedule.

The institutions leaders had no real understanding of the issues at stake and changed nothing about their internal operations,the curators told Artnet News in a statement.

(In another incident in Antwerp, after authorities removed a sculpture of the brutal colonial-era ruler King Leopold II from a public space, the reason given was that the statue was damaged by protestors, implying no official condemnation of the monuments subject.)

Alampi and Fokianaki say that now, with the momentum gathered by heated protests around the world, is the time for systemic change.

We should aim to shape educational models and curricula, rename, unlearn, and listen to all those narratives that have been malevolently erased, they said. Otherwise, to be frank, it all is an empty symbolic gesture that whitewashes the real problems away and ultimately violently capitalizes on pain.

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With Monuments Falling All Over Europe, We Asked Historians and Artists to Weigh in on How They Should Be Replaced - artnet News

Portlands anticipated final vote on the budget for the upcoming fiscal year has been kicked to next week after a surprise no vote by Commissioner ChloeEudaly.

The vote came amid a national movement to defund police departments. Many Portlanders had been pushing for the city to cut at least $50 million from the Portland Police Bureaus budget. The most recent budget proposal had over $244 million going toward thepolice.

Thousands of people took to the streetsto protest police brutality on May 31, 2020, in Portland, Ore. The protests ultimately ended with police using tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the crowd gathered around the Justice Center in downtownPortland.

JonathanLevinson/OPB

After a national outcry over the killing of George Floyd, the commissioners hammered out amendments to the budget related to police reform. These changes would stop money from the cannabis tax flowing into the police bureau, pull armed officers from schools, stop Portland police from being used as law enforcement on TriMet, dissolve the Gun Violence Reduction Team, and cuteight positions from the Special Emergency ReactionTeam.

All told, these amendments would cut the police bureau budget by more than $15 million, according to a tally by the City BudgetOffice.

But Eudaly, while supportive of these changes, said she felt the cuts were low-hanging fruit and didnt go far enough to address the dramatic shift in policing that so many areseeking.

I cant swallow another bitter budget pill in good conscience, she said. I voteno.

Eudaly had proposed her own amendments Thursday, but only the one redirecting cannabis funds won the support of her colleagues. Eudaly and Commissioner Jo Ann Hardesty have been vocal in their belief that money from the cannabis tax should go to people harmed by the war on drugs and not thepolice.

Eudalys other amendments the most significant of which would cut thepolice budget by an additional $4.6 million were met with silence. By the time she read her fifth amendment out loud, the commissioner appearedemotional.

The budget was being treated as an emergency ordinance, which meant, to pass, it needed four votes. Eudalys no vote meant it failed. The budget will now be voted on next week, when it will only need three votes topass.

After the vote, Hardesty released a statement calling Eudalys no vote performative allyship. She said, last year, she proposed half of what is currently on the table, including defunding the Gun Violence Reduction Team, and received no support for anyone on the council, including Eudaly.

While we are making strides in realigning our budget with our values, this no vote does nothing to materially support our BIPOC communities, she wrote. All this does is delay the much-needed relief for ourcommunities.

Eudalys office responded saying the commissioner stands with the tens of thousands of Portlanders who have demanded bold action andwill work with the council to achieve abudget that reflects these calls forreform.

Many in the community had been pushing for a larger cut to the police bureaus funding. Advocacy groups, including Unite Oregon and the Portland African American Leadership Forum, had created a list of demands they were urging the Council to consider amid a national uprising over police brutality. Chief among them: redirecting at least$50 million fromthe $244 million slated for the policebureau.

Those calls were echoed in two hours of testimony Thursday in the lead up to the vote. Many called for police budget cuts of $50 million, if not more, citing a need to drastically rethinkpolicing.

The foundation of our country, our state, and our city policing is racist historically used to control people of color. Its foundation is so outdated. Its rotten, said Ashley Oakley, a resident of Northeast Portland, who said they work with organizations including Native American Youth and Family Center, Self Enhancement Inc, and The Coalition of Communities ofColor.

Any sort of reframing, retraining installation or inspections we try to build on, theyre not working. We need to defund the police and build a new foundation. Personally, Ive never felt protected or served by police in Portland nor any city Ive ever livedin.

In a meeting held with reporters before the budget vote, Hardesty, a vocal advocate for police reform for three decades, expressed skepticism that this figure was the right startingpoint.

Im not sure that $50 million is based on facts, she said. If I was an advocate outside, I would be giving a big number aswell.

Hardesty noted that this is not the last time the city will be looking at the budget, and said she is willing to look at other ways to reduce the need for police. She said she expects to see this reduction with the Portland Street Response, a new pilot program for the city that will have unarmed first responders address calls concerning people experiencinghomelessness.

Hardesty also said that, unlike some of the demonstrators, she does not believe abolition of the police bureau is the answer to the systemic issues within policing. In a call over the weekend with community organizers, she stated clearly she was not anabolitionist.

Im old enough to know some people deserve to be in jail. Thats just my personal opinion. Im never going to support the total abolition, she said. What I do believe is that police are doing way too much. Theyre not mental health professionals. Theyre not housing experts. Theyre not social workers. And weve allowed them to expand their mission to the point that they think they do everything foreverybody.

As part of her budget changes, Hardesty unveiled a series of amendments that would curb the responsibilities of police. These included ending the citys agreement with TriMet, so Portland poolice officers would no longer serve as law enforcement on public transit; disbanding the Gun Violence Reduction Team, which investigates shootings in the city; ending the school resource officer program, so armed police no longer work in schools; and eliminating eight positions within SERT, a police team that responds to emergencyincidents.

All Hardestys amendments were supported by the Council and added to the budget. During the hearing Thursday, Hardesty thanked the thousands who have taken to the street each night for making ithappen.

I want to start by thanking the young people who have taken to the street for over two weeks, she said. I want to thank you for elevating this conversation to the point where there was no doubt that we wouldact.

Hardesty has asked that nearly $5 million from the police bureau go to the Portland StreetResponse.

Earlier this week, Mayor Ted Wheeler promised a series of reforms, including cutting the police specialty units and making a $7 million cut to the Portland Police Bureau. Wheeler said he was not offering those amendments on Thursday as similar ones were being offered by hiscolleagues.

Commissioner Amanda Fritz added amendments that made money available for a tribal liaison position with the citys Office of Governmental Relations and put more funding toward the Civil Rights Title VI Program in the Office of Equity and HumanRights.

Both Wheeler and Fritz said they approved of Hardestys amendments, which are estimated to cut $15 million from the policebureau.

Although this doesnt go as far as the communitys been asking us, it does make a significant difference, Fritzsaid.

Wheeler framed the budget as a middle ground between the call to reduce police spending by roughly one-fifth and his earlier proposal that would have pulled $7 million, roughly 3% of the policebudget.

Its not the 50, he said. But its not theseven.

The Council expects to vote on the budget again nextWednesday.

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Portland Poised To Cut $15 Million From Police Budget, Commissioner Chloe Eudaly Says It's Not Enough - OPB News

Today marks the 14th day of the protests that have erupted in nearly 600 cities and towns following the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade and other victims of police violence. The past two weeks already represent one of the broadest and most radical mass movements in American history.

People are taking to the streets for much more than an end to police brutality. The protests are about equity for Black Americans in the justice system, education, healthcare, workplaces, and all institutions. But dismantling white supremacy in workplaces or classrooms won't be complete or meaningful until Black people are safe going for a run or sleeping in their beds. This push to treat racism as a human as well as civil rights issue, with correspondingly urgent solutions, is one of the founding ideas behind the Black Lives Matter movement. Thus, the current protests are focusing on the police: perhaps the most dire threat Black people's safety as they go about their lives.

It's unanimous among the protesters that cops involved in recent police killings should be convicted, and the officials who protected them should resign. But when it comes to saving the life of the next George Floyd, there's an ideological split.

Many believe that police reform mandatory body cameras, implicit bias training and stricter use-of-force rules is the way to end police brutality. But a rapidly growing number of protesters disagree. Many are taking George Floyd's death specifically as evidence that a reform approach has failed, and instead, for the police to be defunded and ultimately abolished. Floyd died in Minneapolis, one of the most progressively governed cities in the country, where expansive reforms were instituted after Philando Castile's death in 2016. There are different ideas about timeline, but generally, police abolition is based on the premise that police departments are inherently corrupt and racist, going back to their roots in slave patrols. In addition to a tainted history, advocates believe that because police forces attract violent people and due to the immense power police hold in city governments and via their unions, reform will never work. (In abolitionists' eyes, when officers ignore reforms and their superiors and local officials won't or lack the authority to properly enforce them and punish violators, that's the same thing as reform not working). Thus, all public safety spending should be shifted from paramilitary style police forces towards schools, public housing, social workers, mental health and addiction services, among other programs.

The movement's divide between reform and abolition crystallized when DeRay McKesson and Campaign Zero (a police brutality think thank) unveiled #8Can'tWait, a set of eight reforms to reduce use of force by police. A group of abolitionists (find the authors here) quickly answered with #8ToAbolition, a set of steps towards a community safety plan that doesn't include police. The authors condemned #8Can'tWait as "dangerous and irresponsible" and calling it "a slate of reforms that have already been tried and failed," which "mislead a public newly invigorated to the possibilities of police and prison abolition" and "do not reflect the needs of criminalized communities."

McKesson has said he's advocating for reform because, as he told GQ, "police are still going to be here tomorrow" AKA reform is more realistic. However, on Sunday, Minneapolis City Council made voted in a veto-proof majority to begin dismantling the Minneapolis Police Department. The Minneapolis Parks Department, the University of Minnesota, some local museums and the public school system have all independently severed ties with the police. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti agreed last week to reallocate $250 million from his original proposed budget to "[reinvest] in black communities and communities of color," with $100-150 million of that sum coming from the LAPD's $1.8 billion budget. New York Mayor Bill De Blasio has vowed to slash the NYPD's $6 billion budget, potentially by over a billion dollars (city comptroller has pushed for a $1.1 billion cut, and multiple city council members said they wouldn't sign off on the budget unless cuts are "meaningful").While these cities are figuring out what "defunding" and "dismantling" will look like, these victories show that the demands being painted as outlandish are well within reach.

Indeed, in response to the recent events, this week #8Can'tWait has revised their platform to include abolition and apologized. "We at Campaign Zero acknowledge that, even with the best of intentions, the #8Can'tWait campaign unintentionally detected from the efforts of fellow organizers invested in paradigmatic shifts that are newly possible in this moment," reads a statement on 8cantwait.org. "For this we apologize wholeheartedly and without reservation." (Writer Clarkisha Kent has pointed out online that #8Can'tWait's new materials borrow heavily from #8ToAbolition without credit.)

Activists who were once cynical about abolition changing course in the same breath as city governments has everything to do with a radical, rapid shift in public opinion. In the course of a week, police abolition has gone from being seen as a leftist fantasy championed by academics and activists, to a mainstream policy proposal. Tens of thousands of people who'd never heard the term before (and who have no idea what ACAB means) are calling their elected officials about city police budgets, and convincing their boomer parents that reform is not the answer. Police abolition is being defended and explained in every major publication. A group of celebrities ranging from Common, Talib Kweli and Jane Fonda, to JoJo, Lizzo and Minka Kelly have signed onto an open letter co-written by Black Lives Matter and Movement 4 Black Lives, calling to defund the police.

What has always been clear to some thinkers and activists has become clear to millions of people. Those people, who were previously shielded by privilege or ignorance, are reconsidering who and what they believe police really protect, as they watch the video of Derek Chauvin with his knee on George Floyd's neck alongside images and stories of the police operating like a military police cars being driven into protesters, officers pushing an elderly man to the ground and leaving him to bleed, people losing eyes to rubber bullets, a young woman who died after being tear gassed. People are discovering that in cities like New York, more money is spent on policing than health, housing, homelessness, youth and community development combined. When a disruption in their lives is big enough to make people fundamentally reconsider how they think the world works, very little is impossible.

In Minneapolis, New York, and Los Angeles, elected officials have already made moves to begin defunding the police. According to CityLab, at least 14 other U.S. cities have proposed or committed to moving resources away from the police, albeit in more incremental terms than Minneapolis, like decreasing officer counts or cuts. An even bigger number is talking about getting police out of schools. The more pressure directed at elected officials right now, the more lasting the impacts of this moment will be.

You don't need to be a scholar to get involved, but do your homework. Activists have been sketching out a world without police or the prison-industrial complex for a long time. The websites of #8ToAbolition and MPD150 (a Minneapolis police abolition group that's been vital to the public opinion shift), are great places to start. Both have lots of original tools and resources, as well as "resources" sections with comprehensive lists of continued readings. Are Prisons Obsolete? by Dr. Angela Davis and The End of Policing by Alex Vitale are both foundational.

Once you've wrapped your head around abolition, find out if there are already people or groups working on it in your city: either as a part of an abolition group, or another organization working on budget reform (like People's Budget LA) or criminal justice issues. Dig around local news and social media. Journalism non-profit The Marshall Project aggregates news about police abolition efforts. In North Carolina, Durham Beyond Policing, a grassroots coalition pushing for police divestment, has been around since 2016. They successfully advocated last year against an officer increase and for the creation of a Safety and Wellness Task force. They're preparing to fight against a 5% budget police increase. Critical Resistance is an abolitionist group with chapters in Los Angeles, New York, Portland and Oakland. The Anti-Police Terror Project works on defunding, among other issues in the Bay Area. Efforts can also be more dispersed: at a city council meeting in Denver, this week, a group of 50 community members backed by two council members, took the floor to call for defunding the Denver Police Department.

If there's no existing campaign or resources in your city, you may have to start from the ground up. Start researching your city's 2020 budget and asking questions. What percentage of your city's budget does the police account for? Is it an increase from last year? How does that number compare to cities of similar size? How does the number compare to spending on education, affordable housing and mental health services? Are there any disconcerting earmarks on the police's budget? Some places like Chicago, police budgets specifically have cash set aside for police misconduct settlements. What's the cop-to-population ratio in your city? What is the police's relationship to your public school system?

Once you have some of the answers, identify ways you can voice your opinion, like calling and emailing your local budget office. Figure out who has to sign off on the budget for it to pass (usually the mayor and city council members), and call them too. Figure out the next budget hearing or committee meeting where there's an opportunity for public testimony. Social media has been instrumental to recent victories. Turn compelling information about your local police department, paired with action steps, into an Instagram graphic. You may be surprised how quickly it spreads.

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How Police Abolition Became a Mainstream Idea Overnight - Papermag