Category Archives: Abolition Of Work

STATUES and monuments across Leeds are to come under scrutiny following the Black Lives Matter protests.

Leeds City Council announced the review as part of its response to an ongoing debate around statues of some historic figures.

It will be led by the citys first female BAME ward councillor Alison Lowe, who represented Labour from 1990 to 2019 and is the chief executive of mental health charity Touchstone.

The move follows actions by other local authorities across the country who have seen demonstrations and protests including the toppling of the statue of 17th century slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol.

Leeds City Council leader Councillor Judith Blake said: Were incredibly proud of our diverse multicultural city here in Leeds and particularly proud of the relationships we have and the work we do with our communities across the city.

Its absolutely crucial to us that we keep those relationships strong and everything we do is done in a spirit of dialogue, consultation and, most importantly, listening to peoples views.

We have decided to look at the statues we have in the city and understand their background to ensure our citys rich multi-cultural history is appropriately celebrated and represented and also to identify any gaps that exist."

Earlier this week demonstrators daubed graffiti on a statue of Queen Victoria in Woodhouse Moor. Council officers have since cleaned the statue up.

Cllr Blake said: As a council and a city we will always support freedom of speech and peoples rights to express their views in a peaceful and respectful way. However, we do have established policies regarding graffiti on public property and will continue to enforce these.

Among the statues highlighted by protestors for removal are those of Sir Robert Peel, known as the father of modern British policing. A statue in Leeds is one of many memorials around the country to the former Prime Minister and reformer. It is listed on the website Topple the Racists - but it is unclear whether protestors are confusing him with his textile-manufacturer father, who opposed the abolition of slavery.

Peels government introduced important social reforms, including acts forbidding the employment of women and children in mines and limiting their working hours in factories. He also fought against his own party to repeal the Corn Laws, to makemore food available for Ireland during the potato famine. A petition on change.org to remove his statue in Leeds has gained nearly 1,400 signatures. Cllr Blake said there seemed to be recognition that there had been some misunderstanding about Robert Peel whose statue is in Leeds, and that it was actually his father who worked in the cotton trade.

The rest is here:

City-wide review of statues and monuments in Leeds - Wharfedale Observer

AS councils across England and Wales hurriedly move to examine their statues and memorials for links to slavery and plantation owners, Boltons own links to the historic trade in human beings is coming under the spotlight.

Hundreds of petitions have been started on the website Change.org to replace statues and signs of slave traders, colonialists and imperialists since the statue of Edward Colston was torn down in Bristol on Sunday.

The petitions come amidst protests around the world for the Black Lives Matter movement and justice for George Floyd. A viral petition for Justice for George Floyd has amassed more than 16million signatures, making it the biggest petition in history.

During the late 1700s and early 1800s, Bolton became a thriving manufacturing town with its growth mainly due to its extensive involvement in the processing of cotton much of which was produced by slaves in the Caribbean.

Boltons continued investment in the Caribbean slavery system was mainly through two families: the McConnels and the Kennedys who owned plantations in Barbados and Jamaica.

But while Boltons manufacturers and its population undoubtedly profited from transatlantic slavery, compared with many other UK towns and cities there was unease with the towns links to the slave trade and following the passing of a law to end the trade by the British in March 1807, agitation to end slavery grew. In 1820 many of the emancipated slaves from the colonies who were now in Bolton spoke out against the poor conditions that existed in slavery and that year a petition was drawn up calling for the total abolition of slavery in the British colonies.

Former Mayor of Bolton Cllr Frank White, who has studied the period, said: Bolton textile workers refused to work with slave-picked cotton during the American Civil War so much so that some mills closed.

The workers wrote in support to Abraham Lincoln and he wrote back to them thanking them for their help and recognising they suffered hardship.

The Bank Street Unitarians in Bolton were also very heavily involved in supporting the abolition of slavery.

Much of the credit for the towns opposition lies with fugitive slave James Watkins, who lectured at meetings in the Bolton and Westhoughton areas and lived in the town for a few years.

Watkins visited local mill workers to petition their support for the anti-slavery movement, emphasising the connection between the cotton industry and slavery and telling rapt audiences how he escaped, after many attempts, from his Maryland plantation.

Today there remains a plaster frieze including a depiction of a man, assumed to be Watkins, over a shop front in Market Street, Westhoughton, which is now the Provenance Food Hall restaurant.

Watkins and a number other fugitive slaves spoke in Bolton, added historian Laurence Westgaph. Unlike Liverpool, the workers in the cotton towns showed much solidarity with the runaways.

More:

Why Bolton decided to honour a slave rather than the slave traders - The Bolton News

This week, a family monument in the grounds of Lancaster Priory Church was daubed with the words "slave trader".

The graffiti is accurate - the Rawlinson family was involved in the importation of mahogany and in the slave trade during the 18th Century - making vast sums of money in the process.

The Black Lives Matters (BLM) protests in Lancaster and across the world - sparked by the death of George Floyd in the US but fuelled by countless other incidents of racism and oppression over centuries - have resulted in a chain of events that has already seen statues removed - one thrown into the sea - in other English towns and cities.

Campaigners are now calling for many others to be removed.

Calls have also been made to Lancaster City Council to re-name streets such as Lindow Square, while many people feel the education system needs to better reflect the country's colonial past, and the way in which this changed the world, and which is now making history again.

The term "decolonisation" attempts to describe how this could be untangled.

A series of Tweets by Lancaster University sociologist Imogen Tyler documenting Lancaster's huge slave trade connections went viral, while Lancaster City Council has said that the events provide "the catalyst for a wider conversation about Lancasters slave trade legacy and the way those who were directly involved have been commemorated."

The Rev Chris Newlands, Vicar of Lancaster, made a statement in front of the Rawlinson memorial this week, after it was graffiti'd with the words "slave trader".

He said that while he does not endorse the act, he can understand the sentiment behind it.

He was due to retire in September, but told the Lancaster Guardian that he "cannot retire in a crisis" and would remain in his post for now.

He described the way in which vast sums of money were made during the slave trade as an "abomination" and announced potential plans for a new memorial to commemorate the "countless" slaves that were seen as possessions, often abused and killed, many right here in the Lancaster area.

He said: "The slave trade is, to our deep shame and lasting regret, a part of the history of this city.

"And our history is one thing that we cannot change, much as we would like to.

"What we can, and must change in our present is the appalling inequality in our society which does not treat all people as equal.

"The Black Lives Matter protests in our own country as well as throughout the USA and other nations, has made that important point very clearly.

"The memorial is above the vault in which are buried the members of the Rawlinson family, whose vast fortunes placed them among the wealthiest of Lancasters citizens at the time.

"This memorial is a clear statement of their wealth and status.

"However that money came from the slave trade which, though accepted in their own day, is now seen as an evil which still needs to be expunged from the world.

"In England, a law was passed in 1807 to abolish the slave trade.

"We commemorated its bicentenary some time ago but as we did, we acknowledged that there is still slavery in the world, where people are exploited, abused and even killed because of their ethnicity, and that is why we absolutely need to support the Black Lives Matter Protest.

"I am not endorsing this vandalism, though I do understand the righteous anger which made it happen.

"People are more important than monuments, let me be clear about that.

"This monument is a part of the history of our city, whether we like it or not.

"And this graffiti is now also a part of that history, representing a moment in time when anger over the death of a black mans murder by a white policeman in the United States, spread across the world.

"I hope this moment in time makes a difference in every nation, and that all people can stand up and say that Black Lives Matter.

"BAME people and those of us who stand up to be counted as their allies cannot change our history, but we can make our present a better place.

"We are beginning to look at the possibility of having a memorial in the Churchyard to the countless slaves who were seen as possessions and not as even human, and who bore unimaginable pain and abuse, and even death to secure profit for those who made vast wealth from their suffering.

"Perhaps that would go some way to being a necessary corrective to trophy-memorials such as this."

Lancaster's slave trade history is well documented, and there have been many events, exhibitions and talks over the years to bring the matter to light.

There are also many examples of modern day slavery happening right here in the city and wider county over recent years.

In a letter to Lancaster City Council, Geraldine Onek, who the Lancaster Guardian spoke to last week about her own experiences of racism in Lancaster, said: "The recent wave of anti-racism protests around the world, in support of black lives, has been an encouraging and welcome sign that communities are ready and willing to address the racial injustices that permeate every aspect of British society.

"I would like to know, what steps Lancaster City Council will take, to ensure that the atrocities committed here, in our district are brought to light?

"What steps will they take to ensure that the victims of Lindow, Gillow, Bond, Barber and others are honoured in the same way those men have been honoured?

"What commitment will Lancaster City Council make to ensure that present-day racial inequality in Lancaster is identified and addressed?"

In response to the campaign requesting the renaming of streets linked to those involved in the slave trade, the council released the following statement: The city councils decision to light the Ashton Memorial purple over the weekend was a strong symbol of our solidarity with all those who are protesting against prejudice, injustice and discrimination in all their forms.

"It also provides the catalyst for a wider conversation about Lancasters slave trade legacy and the way those who were directly involved have been commemorated.

We welcome the opportunity that this campaign has provided in creating a space for those discussions to take place.

"This will allow us to develop a deeper understanding and reflection of the issues, the views of our communities, and how we can work together to develop a response."

Prof Imogen Tyler, a sociologist at Lancaster University, recently published a book called Stigma - The Machinery of Inequality.

She said her daughter attending the Black Lives Matters protest in Dalton Square prompted her to consider the location of the protest, and how some of the buildings in the square were connected to the slave trade.

She was able to draw information from her book, in the series of Tweets included below.

She said: "She sent me some photos back, and I was really struck by the fact that Dalton Square itself, and some of the houses, and those that lived there, were connected to slavery and plantation ownership overseas."

Today, she said that new research has revealed how "the wealth derived from slavery and slave ownership in Lancaster directly shaped the establishment of a new class of powerful elites in Britain."

#BlackLivesMatter in Lancaster, UK. A brief thread on making visible Lancaster's local & global histories of Slavery & Plantation Labour, legacies of colonial capitalist extraction, & racialised violence which shape the (failed) neoliberal market economies of the present.

In the 18th century, Lancaster was heavily involved in the Atlantic slave-trade. It was the fourth largest slave-trading port in England, developing its River Lune Quay Side Port. http://collections.lancsmuseums.gov.uk/narratives/narrative.php?irn=43

Lancaster merchants developed commercial networks in the West-Indies & Americas. Importing slave-produced goods, mahogany, sugar, dyes, spices, coffee & rum, & later cotton for Lancashires mills, from plantations, & exporting fine furniture, gunpowder, woollen & cotton goods.

Young men from Lancaster families worked as agents and factors across the West-Indies, and Lancaster families became wealthy plantation and slave owners, wealth inherited through generations. (see historian Melinda Elder)

Lancaster's most famous son, the anatomist & palaeontologist Sir Richard Owen, who coined the word dinosaur & founded the Natural History Museum, was the son of a Lancaster based West Indies Merchant (died in St Barts) who was almost certainly involved in slavery in some form

In 1754, a Lancaster born slaver called Miles Barber established one of the most significant commercial slaving hubs in the history of British involvement in the Atlantic slave trade. (see Bruce Mouser https://doi.org/10.3406/outre.1996.3483)

This place of horror was called Factory Island, and was situated on one of the Iles de Los Island group off the African coast of Guinea-- just north of the Sierra Leone River. (see also http://slaveryandremembrance.org/articles/article/?id=A0140)

Over the course of the following decades Barber developed and managed an estimated 11 slave factories and barracoons along the West African coast. By 1776 Barber was being described by his contemporaries as the owner of the greatest Guinea House in Europe. (see Elder in below)

As Eric Williams details in Capitalism and Slavery (1944), slave traders dominated local political life in towns like Lancaster as aldermen, mayors and councillors, and some invested their inherited fortunes in the development of local mills and businesses.

by 1750 there was hardly a trading or a manufacturing town in England which was not in some way connected with the triangular or direct colonial trade. The profits obtained provided ... that accumulation of capital in England which financed the Industrial Revolution.

The first cotton mills in the Lancaster district were established in a village called Caton in 1783, by Thomas Hodgson (17381817). Thomas & his brother John worked as slave traders for over 30yrs. Between 1763-1791 they were involved in the capture & sale of circa 14,000 people

Thomas began his slaving career working for the Lancaster born slaver Miles Barber, indeed records suggest that the Hodgson brothers took over the running of Factory Island off the African coast from Barber in 1793, a decade after they opened their first Lancashire cotton mill

The Hodgson cotton mills in Caton specialised in the exploitation of pauper child labourers, transporting orphans from urban centres across England, primarily from Liverpool but also from London, to work in their mills as forced apprentice labour. (See local historian Huddleston)

During the same period, John Bond (1778 1856) who would twice be appointed as Major of the town, inherited several plantations and over 700 enslaved people in (then) British Guiana & Grenada from his slave trading uncle Thomas Bond.

His inheritance included a cotton plantation in Guiana (Guyana) Lancaster. This other Lancaster, a cotton plantation, was visited in the mid-C18th by an English physician, Dr George Pinckard, who described it as distinguished by the inhuman treatment of the slaves.

Lancaster Town Hall sits in Dalton Square, scene of recent #BlackLivesMatter solidarity events, which contains grand Georgian houses. 1 Dalton Sq. was home to aforementioned plantation & slave-owner John Bond, who lived off the profits from the "other Lancaster" in Guiana

John Bond became a multi-millionaire overnight, when the British Government legislated that taxpayers would compensate a wealthy group of aristocrats, landowners and middle-class inheritors, for the loss of their human property. See The Slavery Abolition Act of 1833

Details of the huge windfall (approximately 2 million pounds) received by John Bond, the compensation for freedom of slaves in British Guinea, as part of a 17 billion pounds package of compensation paid to former slave-owners, can be tracked at https://ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

John Bond spent a lot of his fortune employing the esteemed Lancaster furniture company Gillows to furnish his Dalton Square House & other properties - Gillows was another Lancaster business also knee deep in histories of slavery & plantation blood.

Founded by Robert Gillow in 1728, this acclaimed manufacturer pioneered the use of mahogany from the West Indies in the crafting of expensive furniture for British & colonial elites. Gillow was also a significant Atlantic slaver who financed a number of Lancaster slave ships.

Robert Gillow & his partners took care to conceal their connections to the Slave Trade, but examination of their books suggests that between 1754-1765 three quarters of the ships financed by Gillows were slave trading vessels.

& at least 40% of Gillow's profits in the mid C18th came from profits made in the selling of human beings, and the rest was supported by slave-labour (mahogany, Rum, Sugar and more).

Not for nothing is Lancaster University Student Union Nightclub called 'the Sugar House' - a former sugar processing & storage site in Sugar House Alley opposite Green Ayre on the banks of the Lune River, the place slave ships & other trans-Atlantic vessels where made & launched.

After his tax-payer windfall, Bond was one of Gillows biggest clients & his son Edward later became a partner in the firm. The fine houses in Lancaster & their mahogany cladded interiors conceal universes of barbarity, terror & suffering. The poet Dorothea Smartt writes on this:

The histories of slavery, plantation & industrial exploitation on which Lancaster was built have only been partially researched, we have a slave memorial on the Quay, & important work by historians such as Alan Rice & artists such as

If you are interested in decolonizing local histories please do let me know below. I am continuing to work on my "Decolonizing Lancaster" research, including through collaborations with historians, artists & others in the local community.

As Lubaina Himid writes Lancaster is 'a city in which traders became Abolitionists & in which Quakers owned slave ships. There are beautiful buildings designed by men involved in horrible deeds. Behind doors ... hidden histories of almost invisible African people' (in Rice below)

Long after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade (1807) & long after the profits had been collected from the abolition of slavery in the British empire (1833), Lancaster & Lancastrians continued to profit from historical ties to slavery & plantation economies.

For example, Lancaster's C19th century industrial heyday of Lino Kings was underpinned by slavery "windfalls" & by cotton imported from plantations in the Americas, a web of connections which can be traced through industrial & economic histories, & family inheritances.

On this interconnedness see Himids http://cotton.com project, which brings the words of mill-workers & plantation workers into dialogue through the medium of cotton & words, words collected on the plantation & in the factory in the mid-19th century.

Follow this link:

What next? Lancaster's slave trade past in the spotlight again as calls are made to re-name streets and create a new memorial - Lancaster Guardian

By Laurent Lafrance and Richard Dufour 8 June 2020

In Quebec, the Canadian province most affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, anger is running high among the approximately 550,000 public sector workers whose collective agreements expired March 31. Health care and education workers and other public employees have suffered years of real wage cuts, while their workloads have continued to grow as the result of an unending series of budget cuts and concession contracts.

Conditions are now driving the public sector workers into a head-on collision with the provinces right-wing populist Coalition Avenir Qubec (CAQ) government.

There is the grave danger of coronavirus infection because of the governments failure to procure and provide personal protective equipment; more than 5,000 health care workers have already been infected and four orderlies have died. There are the ministerial orders that force health care workers, and potentially teachers, to work longer hours, cancel their summer holidays, and override their work schedules and assignments. And to top it all off, there is the intense campaignled jointly by Premier Franois Legault and his CAQ and the public sector unionsto quickly impose new contracts, in the name of focusing on the health emergency, containing major givebacks in wages and working conditions.

Anger is raging on social media where nurses, teachers, orderlies and other public sector employees are voicing their frustration. Feeling the heat coming from the rank-and-file, union bureaucratswho have rallied behind Premier Legault especially since the outbreak of the coronavirus crisishave organized a few token protests in recent days.

On May 27, dozens of nurses were called upon by their union, the FIQ (Fdration interprofessionelle de la sant), to demonstrate in front of a nursing home in the Montreal neighborhood of Ahuntsic-Cartierville against government threats to cancel their summer holidays, or limit them to two weeks. The following day, about 100 members of the CNTU (Confederation of National Trade Unions), working in the health, social services and education sectors, protested in front of Premier Legaults Montreal offices. The same day, dozens of workers from the Montrgie-Ouest Health Centre took part in a rally organized by the four unions at the facility to demand an easing of their onerous working conditions.

Union leaders, however, have no intention of mobilizing public sector workers in Quebec, nor calling upon all sections of the working class in Canada to join their class brothers and sisters in the United States in a common counteroffensive against capitalist austerity. Rather, their goal is to help the ruling class make workers pay for the hundreds of billions of dollars handed out to big business by Justin Trudeaus federal Liberal governmentpolicies which the trade unions fully endorsed at the federal level. (See: Canadian unions cement anti-worker corporatist alliance with government and big business)

The public sector negotiations have been exposed as a fraud with Legault refusing to budge one iota from his original concessionary offers. Quebecs CAQ government is determined to limit wage increases for all public sector workers to 5 percent over three yearsa decrease in real wages when inflation is taken into accountwith a few hundred dollars in lump-sum payments thrown in.

Nothing will be done about working conditionschronic under-staffing in hospitals and schools, mandatory overtime for nurses, excessively high patient-to-caregiver and student-to-teacher ratios, etc. The continuous deterioration of working conditions over many years has caused burnout and chronic health issues among public sector workers. For the population, it has meant a massive erosion in the quality of public services. By mutual agreement between the government and unions, all of these crucial and contentious issues have been excluded from the current blitz of negotiations and relegated to future discussion forumsthat is, to oblivion.

Moreover, the government has already taken advantage of the coronavirus crisis to arrogate to itself the power to arbitrarily assign public sector employees to any task, which will worsen already unbearable working conditions.

All this does not prevent the unions from negotiating behind closed doors with the Legault government and preparing to sign sellout agreements. The unions fully accept the austerity fiscal framework dictated by Legault and the ruling class demand that sellout contracts be quickly adopted in this time of crisis to ensure social peacethat is, the increased and unbridled exploitation of workers for the benefit of the super-rich and the financial markets. (See: Unions to work with Quebecs new right-wing populist government)

In a communiqu sent to its members, the CNTU justified its abandonment of a few demagogic demands it made last December. Echoing the governments arguments, the union bureaucrats pointed to uncertainty about the evolution of the health crisis, an expected deficit in public finances, an unemployment rate of 17 per cent, and social-distancing rules that prohibit gatherings.

Union demands for the current round of negotiations are essentially in line with the governments offers. The government is not budging from its offer of a 1.75 percent wage increase for each of the first two years, and 1.5 percent in the third year of a three-year contract. The QFL (Quebec Federation of Labor) is asking for 2 percent in each of the three years and a few more crumbs for the lowest paid. The CSQ (Centrale des syndicats du Qubec) is asking for 1.75 percent in the first year, 2.05 percent in the second year, and 2.20 percent in the third year. For the CNTU, its roughly 2.2 percent the first two years and 3 percent the third year. The FIQ has not disclosed its wage proposals.

The position of all the unions is aptly summarized by this CSQ statement: The CSQ recalls that, in response to the Treasury Boards disappointing offer on May 6, it submitted a counter-proposal to the government that respected the negotiating framework demanded by the government. In other words, there is a tripartite agreement between government, management and unions on the essential issue of maintaining austerity and making public sector workersand the working class as a wholepay for the capitalist crisis.

The union leaders are only begging the government to throw them a bone to help them ram through labor contracts that will do nothing to redress, and in fact will exacerbate, the longstanding decline in real wages and working conditions. They feign shock when their government partner does not hesitate to complicate their task by turning every promise of a few crumbs into a new mechanism to increase the exploitation of the workers. Thus, a promise to boost teachers entry-level pay was suddenly accompanied by a new government demandan increase in the number of compulsory working hours from 32 to 40 hours per week for all teachers, with no increase in pay.

Another widely touted government promise is an increase in the hourly wage for orderlies from $20.55 to $25 or $26. This measure is intended to divide public sector workers by targeting a single category, or even a subcategory, of employees: orderlies working in nursing homes. It would not apply to the thousands of orderlies who work in hospitals, nor to those in the private sector who earn little more than the minimum wage. Moreover, the pay raises are to be in the form of bonuses or lump sums, separate from the regular salary scales, meaning they could be easily abolished in the future and will not be included in the calculation of pensions. Faced with Legaults concern that nurses or other workers could demand similar wage increases, QFL President Daniel Boyer rushed to reassure the Premier that the unions will ensure there is no domino effect.

The role the unions have been playing for decades in imposing the cutbacks demanded by the ruling class emerges clearly from a letter addressed to Premier Legault by the presidents of Quebecs major union federations, including Daniel Boyer of the QFL, Jacques Ltourneau of the CNTU and Sonia Ethier of the CSQ. Under the title Lets sit and talk ( Faut quon son se parle ), this letter is a candid admission by these loyal servants of the ruling class that they stand fully behind the brutal big business offensive on jobs, wages, pensions and public services.

It is sadly obvious to us, wrote these union bureaucrats with their usual indifference to the plight of their members, that thousands of workers will not get back the jobs they held two months ago. Issuing a call for social dialogue, they offered their services to the ruling class in restoring the competitiveness of Quebec Inc. and stifling the immense social opposition that this job massacre will provoke.

Even before the pandemic, the health and education sectors had been bled dry by decades of budget cuts in the name of capitalist austerity. The subordination of all societys resources to the profits of big business today means that millions of jobs are being eliminated, and those who still have a job are being forced, under threat of dismissal, to return to work without any real protection from the COVID-19 pandemic.

What is needed is not social dialogue with a financial aristocracy that is completely indifferent to the fate and lives of millions of workers, but a direct challenge to the existing capitalist order. The working class must, through its independent political mobilization, advance its own solution to the current crisis, based on the complete reorganization of the economy to satisfy human needs.

This means, for public sector employees, the rejection not only of the bogus offers being negotiated between the government and the unions, but of the entire ideological framework of the negotiations. The claim that workers must do their part in the midst of the immense health and socioeconomic crisis created by the criminal negligence of the ruling class must be rejected. Resources exist in abundance to meet vital social needs, but they are being hijacked by a profit-obsessed financial and corporate oligarchy.

Workers must take the struggle into their own hands and establish rank-and-file committees, independent of the pro-capitalist unions. The task of these committees will be to mobilize the social power of the working class to fight for the following demands: an emergency program for the construction of hospitals and schools; the hiring of tens of thousands of new employees and a vast expansion of public services; mass coronavirus testing and personal protective equipment for all public sector workers; the abolition of compulsory overtime; and a real wage catch-up of 15 percent per year, and 20 percent for low-wage earners, every year of the contract.

The fight for these demands can be taken forward only by waging a political struggle against capitalism in the closest unity with workers in the rest of Canada, the US and internationally.

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Quebec unions and government conspire behind the backs of health and education workers - World Socialist Web Site

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Following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and an outbreak of police violence in response to nationwide protests, calls for change in Americas police departments are coming from activists,public officials, and celebrities. But unlike past attempts to reform the police in the wake of high-profile killings of people of color, which often centered on increased oversight or training, this time the demands are far more radical: defund police departments or abolish them entirely.

Efforts to cut off funding for police have already taken root in Minneapolis, where the police departments budget currently totals $193 million. (In 2017, the department received 36 percent of the citys general fund expenditures.) Two days after Floyds killing, the president of the University of Minnesota declared that that the campus would no longer contract with the police department to provide security for large gatherings like football games. On Friday, a member of the Minneapolis Board of Education announced a resolution to end the school districts contract to station 14 cops in its schools. And community groups such as the Black Visions Collective and Reclaim the Block are petitioning the city council to cut the police departments budget by $45 million and reinvest the money in health and (non-police) safety programs.

With other campaigns to cut police budgets underway in cities like Los Angeles and New York and calls to defund the police gathering steam on social media, I spoke with Brooklyn College sociology professor Alex Vitale, the coordinator of the Policing & Social Justice Project and author of The End of Policing, to talk about the sweeping vision of police abolition and what it means in practice.

Madison Pauly: Why defund the police, rather than reform them?

Alex Vitale: Five years ago, in the wake of the murders of Mike Brown and Eric Garner and Tamir Rice, we were told, Dont worry, were going to fix it. Were going to give the police implicit bias training. Were going to hold some community police encounter sessions. Were gonna buy some body cameras. A whole set of what we often refer to as procedural reforms designed to make the police more professional, less biased, more transparentand that this is going to magically fix the problem. But things did not get better. People are still being killed, and more importantly, the problem of overpolicing remains.

Why didnt it work?

Procedural justice folks, they want to restore the publics trust in the police so that the police can go back to policing. But this ignores the question of what they are policing, and whether they should be policing it. We have [millions of] low-level arrests in the United States every year and most of them are completely pointless. It is just a huge level of harassment meted out almost exclusively on the poorest and most marginal communities in our society. There is a deep resentment about policing in those places. And then, when theres a high-profile incident, it unleashes all this pent-up anger and rage.

Reducing policing goes hand in hand with widespread decriminalization, thenof things like having an open container in your front yard or selling untaxed cigarettes.

Absolutely. It goes hand in hand with decriminalizing sex work, drugs, homelessness, mental illness. We dont really need a vice unit, we need a system of legalized sex work thats regulated just like any other business. We dont need school police, we need counselors and restorative justice programs. We dont need police homeless outreach units, we need supportive housing, community based drop-in centers, social workers.

How do you mesh the idea of police abolition with the need to address serious public safety threats like murder or aggravated assault (when those crimes are committed by the general public)?

The criminal justice system says theres one strategy for everythingmake arrests, put them in prison. What abolitionists say is, Well, lets figure out why theyre doing this and try to develop concrete prevention strategies. Not all homicides are the same. Is it a domestic violence case? Is it a school shooting? Is it a drug deal gone bad? We know, for instance, that in almost all the school shooting cases, somebody had a pretty good idea that this might happen, but did not tell anyoneor told the police and the police had no tools to do anything about it. What if instead, we had a system in place where when a young person thinks their friend might do something awful, can go and talk to a responsible adult without worrying that the police will get involved, that they will have ratted on their friend to the police, or that their friend will get expelled from school because of some zero tolerance policy?

Its important to remember that there is no perfect world, theres no perfect solution. What we have now is far from perfect. People get killed all the time, even though our society is filled with police. Can we come up with a situation where there are fewer killings, and fewer collateral consequences?

Where did the movement to abolish the police come from?

It began to take a coherent shape in the late 60s, early 70s. Initially, the radical edge of this, from the Black Panthers and others, was the idea of community control of the police. But a group of activists and academics wrote a document called The Iron Fist and the Velvet Glove, in which they began to say, Wait a secondis there any policing thats actually a good idea? When we understand the fundamental nature of policing, even if the community has control over it, its still a state institution thats predicated on the use of violence to fix problems. And historically, it has never operated in the interests of the poor and the nonwhite.

After the 70s, this idea became very dormant. It was the rise of mass incarceration in the last 20 years that has brought this idea back into the fore. A little over 20 years ago, Critical Resistance was formed in California, which was mostly focused on prison abolition. This led to works by Angela Davis and Ruth Wilson Gilmore that were focused on prison abolition. But communities understood that to achieve prison abolition, we needed to do something about policing as well. So little campaigns began to pop up. In the Black Lives Matter era, theres been a deepening of analysis among the activists who initially just wanted to jail some killer cops, but then began to see that that would not really fix the problem.

Have the campaigns had any victories?

There have been little victories that kind of presaged what were trying to do, but not a lot. Sometimes, what we did is we prevented an increase in spending. People managed to kill a particular program, or funding for a new police academy.

The victories are not going to look like a police department getting shut down. A victory is going to look like, we got police out of the schools, or we created an alternative to using the police to deal with homelessness.

What does this end up looking like on a practical level, say, if my car gets stolen?

A friend of ours, they had their car stolen. The police actually recovered it and arrested the driver. So they were like, See? We need police. And I said, Well, lets dig a little deeper here. What do we know about the person who got arrested that stole your car? Uh, the police said that hed been arrested a bunch of times and there was drug paraphernalia left in the car? And Im like, Hmm. So we tried policing a bunch of times with this guy. Did it prevent your car from getting stolen? No. Is this person stealing cars because they have a drug problem? Probably. Is sending them to jail over and over again fixing their drug problem? No. Okay, if we want to reduce vehicle thefts, the first time that we come in contact with this person, weve got to start trying to address whats driving their problematic behavior.

Without police, or with drastically scaled back police forces, how does the picture change for people and communities who dont use the police or trust them?

For those folks, the picture changes because hopefully they wont have so many problematic things to deal with. The reality is a lot of people just dont call the police as it is because they feel like its just going to make their lives worse. That is a deep truth. And so what we want to do is not just to leave them on their own, we want to try and start fixing their problems. Like domestic violence, which goes grossly underreported because huge numbers of survivors feel that getting the police involved is just going to make the situation worse. Police come, either do nothing, arrest both parties, or arrest the man whom the woman was financially dependent upon. Hes pissed off when he gets out of jail, and he comes and beats her up again. Wheres the community resource center? Where are the supports for families, so that maybe they can fix their problems? Where are the outlets for women so that they can live independently, to get away from an abuser?

How would things change for the white people who reflexively rely on and trust the policethe Amy Coopers of the world?

They wont have this resource that they can weaponize against people. Theyll have to figure out other ways of resolving their problems.

This interview has been edited and condensed.

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What a World Without Cops Would Look Like - Mother Jones

Would Regis Korchinski-Paquet still be alive ifa mental health nurse had turned upwhen her family called 911instead of just police officers?

What about D'Andre CampbellorAndrew Loku? Or Sammy Yatim?

The answer to that can never be known.

Butas protests over police brutality and racism continue across the United States and beyond, sparked by the case of George Floyd an unarmed black man who died in police custody after anofficer pressed his knee onto his neck one of the refrains growing louder and louder is:"Defund the police."

Exactly what that means can differdepending on who you ask. While some have called for anoutright abolition of police forces,others favour reducingpolice budgets so that their work focusesmore squarely on violent crime.

When it comes to dealing with people in mental distress, the sentiments behind the idea of defunding police forces stem from a singular question, saysAlok Mukherjee, who spent a decade as the chair of the Toronto Police Services Board:"Is that armed, highly paid officer the right resource for that function?"

Defunding the police, for Mukherjee, begins with asking, "What percentage of the police officers' work involves drawing the gun? Dealing with violent crime? And what percentage of the work involves social issues?"

"I think the pressure right now around defunding creates an opportunity for people to be seriously thinking about these issues," said Mukherjee,who first wrote a paper asking those very questions about a decade ago.

In Toronto, the police service is the single-biggest line item in the city's $13.5-billion operating budget. Out of an average property tax bill of $3,020, the largest share about $700 is allocated topolice. That's followed by about $520 for transit. Shelters and housing take up about $150while about $60 goes to paramedic services.

Over the past several years, the police budget has risenpast the$1-billion mark. It first hit that markin 2015, withMayor John Tory saying at the time, "We can't afford to keep the cost going up."

There was talk of reducing the size of the force, with the mayor suggestingthe service might need to shed some ofits 5,400 officers.

Still, the budget increased by nearly $41 million last year, with nearly 90 per centgoing toward salaries.

Toronto has seen police officersstationed in schools, called on to respond to mental health crises and embedded in neighbourhoods to foster community ties.

Those, according to University of Toronto sociology professor Akwasi Owusu-Bempah, are just some of the ways in which police have been asked to do more and more over the course of the last few decades.

"In much of the West in the 1980s and 1990s, when we saw the defunding of a variety of very important social services, the police were often left to pick up the slack, and their budgets reflect that," said Owusu-Bempah.

"We've seen a proliferation of gang intervention and prevention programs that include funding for the police ... rather than simply providing after-school services, education services, extracurricular activities and sports activities for young people in disadvantaged neighbourhoods," he said.

Owusu-Bempahsays he's not a "police abolitionist" but thinks a serious distinction has to be drawn between what the police are and are not.

"They're not educators;they're not social support workers," he said

"I want the police to keep my community safe, and unfortunately, the reality for many people is ... the police are ill-equipped to do many of those things."

WATCH |Black Lives Matter co-founder Sandy Hudson on defunding the police:

Out of the nearly one million calls Toronto police respond to every year,about 30,000 are mental health calls, said the department's spokesperson,Meaghan Gray.

"Itis important to note that all police officers are trained to respond to mental health issues," Gray said.

Their annual training consists of courses on communication and de-escalation techniques.

The Toronto policemobile crisis intervention teams, which include atrained officer and a mental health nurse who respond to people in crisis, attend 6,000 mental health calls each year. Those teams do not go to calls where a weapon may be involved.

That wasthe case withKorchinski-Paquet, a 29-year-old Toronto woman who fell to her death from a 24-storey balcony after police were called to a domestic disturbance at her family's apartment last week, Chief Mark Saunders told reporters last week.

Hesaid Toronto police received three calls for an assault with two saying a knife was involved.

Korchinski-Paquet's relativeshavesaid police were called because of a family conflict that left her in distress.Claudette Korchinski-Beals, her mother, has said she asked police to take her daughter to Toronto'sCentre for Addiction and Mental Healthto get her helpbut that instead, she ended up dead.

"I'm not going to send a nurse to a knife fight," Saunders said when asked why a crisis team didn't respond.

The province's police watchdog,the Special Investigations Unit, is looking into the circumstances surroundingKorchinski-Paquet's death, which occurred whileshe was alone with officers in the apartment.

Speaking to reporters Thursday, Saunders spoke about the strain on the police service, saying, "Why do we do over 30,000 calls for mental health? We are law enforcement."

But when he was asked if he would be willing to take a hit to the police budget to free up more money for community groups doing that kind of work, Saunders wouldn't answer directly.

Over the past 12 years, Saunders said, police have been the de factoservice in terms of responding to mental health crises across the city especially between the hours of 4 p.m. and 6 a.m.

"Right now, we've got a responsibility, and we've got a role, and that role is to keep the community safe. Now, we need other agencies to help offload those responsibilities ... then we can start talking about reduction.

Until then, he said, "It would be naive to reduce police officers."

Stachen Frederick, executive director of the Frontlines community centre in the Weston area of Toronto, says reallocating some of the funding to services such asthe youth, meal and job programs her organization provides, with the capacity to support the needs of specific neighbourhoods, would go a long way.

She says many youth workers can find themselves in precarious situations becauseunpredictable fundingmakesit difficult for the young peopletheyserveto develop lasting relationships with them.

The work police doin hercommunity is often about intervention, notprevention,Frederick says.

"This is not about saying that we shun the police from our community," she said. "The police are there to serve and protect. The same as teachers are there to teach.

"Whenyou look at police and engaging in supporting police initiatives, that's a policing of the community. And we know that intervention is not better than prevention."

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Outrage over brutality and calls to 'defund the police' in U.S. cast new light on Toronto police budget - CBC.ca

The call to defund the police has become a rallying cry at protests across America this week, and some lawmakers appear to be listening.

Activists who have long fought to cut law enforcement budgets say they are seeing an unprecedented wave of support for their ideas, with some elected officials for the first time proposing budget reductions and divestments from police. Heres what we know about the movement, and how cities and states are responding.

For years, community groups have advocated for defunding law enforcement taking money away from police and prisons and reinvesting those funds in services. The basic principle is that government budgets and public safety spending should prioritize housing, employment, community health, education and other vital programs, instead of police officers. Advocates argue that defunding is the best way forward since attempts to reform police practices over the last five years have failed, as evidenced by the brutal killing of George Floyd. Groups have a range of demands, with some seeking modest reductions and others viewing full defunding as a step toward abolishing contemporary police services.

In the past four decades, the cost of policing in the US has tripled and is now $115bn, according to a recent analysis. That steady increase comes as crime has been consistently declining. In most cities, spending on police is significantly greater than spending on services and other departments ($1.8bn on police in Los Angeles, for example, which is more than half the citys general fund). The Covid-19 economic crisis has led cities and states to make drastic budget cuts to education, youth programs, arts and culture, parks, libraries, housing services and more. But police budgets have grown or gone largely untouched until pressure from protests this week.

Almost overnight and in direct response to protests, some mayors and other elected leaders have reversed their position on police funding. The mayor of LA said he would look to cut as much as $150m from the police, just two days after he pushed forward a city budget that was increasing it by 7%. A New York councilman has called for a $1bn divestment from the NYPD. In Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, San Francisco and other cities, local policymakers have expressed support for some form of defunding or opposing police budget increases. Most radically, in Minneapolis, councilmembers have discussed potentially disbanding the embattled police department altogether.Colleges, public school systems, museums and other institutions are also divesting from police.

The change in direction is monumental, but the size of the proposed cuts is not, activists have said. In LA, Black Lives Matter has been pushing for a peoples budget that allocates just 5.7% of the general fund to law enforcement, instead of the 51% of the mayors plan. More broadly, longstanding abolitionist groups, such as Critical Resistance and MPD 150, argue that the cities should not be looking for minor savings and cuts, but should be fundamentally reducing the scale and size of the police force and dismantle the traditional law enforcement system. That can start with finding non-police solutions to the problems poor people face, such as counselors responding to mental health calls and addiction experts responding to drug abuse.

Abolition groups argue that policing and prison are at their core racist and harmful and make communities less safe. They also point out that the vast majority of police work has nothing to do with responding to or preventing violence, and that police have a terrible track record of solving murders or handling rape and domestic violence.

While there is no contemporary example of defunding in the US, there are studies suggesting that less policing could mean less crime. In 2014 and 2015, New York officers staged a slowdown to protest the mayor, arguing that if they did less police work, the city would be less safe. But the opposite turned out to be true. When the officers took a break from broken windows policing, meaning targeting low-level offenses, there was a drop in crime. Researchers posited that aggressive policing on the streets for petty matters can ultimately cause social disruption and lead to more crime. Policing that punishes poverty, such as hefty traffic tickets and debts, can also create conditions where crime is more likely. When New York ended stop and frisk, crime did not rise.

Americas powerful police unions have long resisted even minor reforms and accountability measures, and are predictably arguing, without evidence, that budget cuts at any scale will make cities less safe. Theyve cited looting and property damage amid protests this week to suggest that cities dont have enough officers. Defunding advocates, however, have pointed out that the highly militarized response to peaceful demonstrations and the aggressive and at times violent ways officers are handling protesters has only provided further evidence that police cause harm (when there is no public safety threat in the first place).

Americas legacy of racism and severe gun violence epidemic make it difficult to compare to other countries. But some have pointed out that compared to peer nations, the US spends significantly less on social services and more on public safety programs, and has astronomically higher incarceration rates. These investments in police and prison, however, dont translate to a safer country. In fact, police in America kill more people in days than many countries do in years.

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What does 'defund the police' mean? The rallying cry sweeping the US explained - The Guardian

Last Wednesday, University of Minnesota president Joan Gable announced in a statement that the university will no longer enlist the Minneapolis Police Departments services for additional law enforcement support. Gable also announced the university will discontinue contracting with the department for additional support needed for university events, including football games, and any specialized services, such as K-9 explosive detection units.

The divestment arrives on the heels of the gruesome killing of George Floyd, a black Minneapolis resident who died after MPD officer Derek Chauvin was seen with his knee on Floyds neck during an arrest May 25. Floyds last words as he cried out for his mother were all too familiar: I cant breathe. While the department would later report Floyds death as a medical incident, years of evidence to the contrary, as well as eyewitness accounts that include a widely circulated video of the encounter, make clear this was no accident.

But while much attention has been given to Gables statement, which is among the more powerful actions any postsecondary institution has taken in the wake of police-involved killings, considerably less focus has been given to the student leader who issued the demand of divestment on behalf of the student body in her own letter a day before. On that Tuesday, Jael Kerandi, a black woman and undergraduate student body president at the University of Minnesota, authored a letter addressed to Gable along with other university officials and the campus chief of police. Citing data from the Mapping Police Violence project, Kerandi disclosed the clear racial disparity in which the Minneapolis Police Department especially has killed black people at a rate 13 times that of their white counterparts.

Kerandi also noted the departments long historical legacy of racism and racial terror, invoking the names of black men and women who have fallen victim to citizen vigilantism and MPD violence since the late 1960s. In concluding her letter, she rightfully dismissed common approaches that the university had taken to engage in dialogue or mediation with police. Instead, and quite unequivocally, she announced the collective demand that the university cease any partnership with the Minneapolis Police Department immediately.

In 2015, similar to Kerandis action, student demands from 86 institutions called for campus police reform. Those demands explicitly linked policing to institutionalized racism in higher education and revealed a desire from black students and other students of color to be protected from police violence and racism. While some demands expressed critical hope in reforms to ensure protection from police violence and racism, students at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill expressly called for prison and police abolition. But with the continued flagrant violence toward black people at the hands of police, Kerandis final analysis overwhelmingly demonstrates that, far too often, the only relationship possible between police and black and brown people is one that eventually results in death.

To be sure, the concepts of divestment and police abolition are anything but new, although postsecondary institutions have only more recently seriously considered them as a result of student activists demands. Students have long advocated for colleges and universities to reassess their relationship to and divest from police as well as prisons. In fact, just two days ago, the Student Government Association at Ohio State University demanded the university cut ties with the Columbus Police Department. In recent years, police abolition has gained broader popularity in the United States as a result of black social movement organizations like the Dream Defenders, Black Youth Project 100 and the broader collective Movement for Black Lives -- many of which were co-founded by and include college students and young alumni. At the same time, the increased visibility and consumption of digital media depicting the extrajudicial killings of black people has all but legitimized the need for discussing a world without police.

Unfortunately, however, while it is an important model for reimagining higher education, Gables strong follow-up to Kerandis letter and explicit commitment to divest from MPD is an outlier for postsecondary leaders. Whats more, the announcement itself brings into focus the visible (and invisible) relationships between the institution of policing and higher education.

From the inception of the first campus police department in 1894 at Yale to the numerous armed postsecondary departments across at least 44 states, police on college and university campuses have existed for decades. But despite increased public scrutiny and the documentation of police-involved killings, private institutions, state universities and community colleges are continuing to expand campus policing and partnerships with local law enforcement.

Johns Hopkins University and Mt. San Antonio College recently established fully-fledged police departments. Fresno State University supplements its campus police department with partnerships with three public law enforcement agencies. Even at our own university, the use of the Los Angeles Police Department as additional security for students rightfully protesting a talk by xenophobic provocateur Ben Shapiro was an effort financially subsidized by the undergraduate student government.

In part, this espoused need for more localized law enforcement emerged in the wake of the tragic killing of student activists at Kent State in 1970 by the National Guard. However, just a little more than a week later, city and state police shot and killed black student activists at Jackson State University, a historically black institution in Mississippi. These incidents justified a narrative that university-controlled campus police and formalized relationships with local law enforcement are better for students and the campus community. Police scholars contend that university-led policing follows a community-oriented approach, which is to say it is kinder and less aggressive. While campuses are certainly vulnerable to crime and incidents of mass violence, media stories have consistently shown the use of force by police against students of color generally and black students specifically. As such, the inherent contradictions of policing reveal a misplaced focus on individual safety and obscure the prejudicial violence of a deeply racist institution.

Given both the ongoing public visibility of police violence and its impact on and demands from racially minoritized students, colleges and universities are in an important moment in which they should critically interrogate their role in sustaining such an unjust institution. Further, postsecondary institutions must seriously consider divesting from police altogether. According to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the average budget for campus law enforcement is $2.7million, but that number can be higher, such as the $22million budget of the University of California Police Department. As state appropriations per student for institutions continue to trend downward, especially in the wave of furloughs and layoffs at colleges and universities across the country, these funds could be better spent to support student services, teaching and learning.

As police abolitionists, we question the espoused value of policing beyond serving as an apparatus for state violence. As higher education scholars who have conducted research on campus racial climate, student-community organizing and policing for nearly a decade, we also question the presence of police in educational contexts in which those they disproportionately brutalize and kill are expected to live, work and learn. In response to these questions, we believe there is an undeniable moral imperative for postsecondary institutions to divest from the use and supplementation of local police departments for law enforcement.

Simultaneously, a parallel investment in structures and resources that humanize and offer dignity to racially minoritized students and communities is desperately needed. This historic moment provides an opportunity to envision new approaches to safety and community well-being that are grounded in compassion and the value of human life. We find this especially important as the contested decisions to reopen campuses this fall are accompanied by policy considerations to heighten surveillance, restrict movement and other tactics consistent with a police state likely to be enforced by law enforcement agencies.

Both the xenophobic, anti-Asian rhetoric associated with COVID-19 as well as its specifically devastating impact on black communities only further stigmatize groups already vulnerable to state control and police brutality. Hence, as higher education news stories continue to highlight pandemic-driven changes, the divestment from police (toward the end of abolition) is an absolutely necessary consideration.

See original here:

On the heels of the George Floyd killing, colleges have a moral imperative to not work with local police (opinion) - Inside Higher Ed

While protesters for Black lives across the country are being met with the same kind of brutalizing behavior that led them to the streets in the first place, many are beginning to consider whether the institution of policing can be saved at all. Leading the charge is an increasingly broad and diverse group of organizers, academics, and even politicians who have begun to consider whether the twin institutions of policing and incarceration are worth the suffering they seem incapable of evading. Though the abolition of prisons and policing is often dismissed as unimaginably radical, these advocates contend that our communities would be safer and healthier were we to divert the funds we spend on these measures towards bettering economic, housing, and health outcomes in the most vulnerable neighborhoods.

It may be difficult for many of us to begin to imagine public safety and accountability that does not rely on police and prisons, but two modern cartoons,Rebecca Sugars Steven Universe andNoelle Stevensons She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, are both replete with abolitionist themes that can inspire us to commit to new ways of keeping each other safe.

Image via Cartoon Network

In Steven Universe, Steven and the other Crystal Gems use bubbling to hold in stasis the gem monsters they defeat. Unlike incarceration, bubbling doesnt actively harm the gem monsters, but Steven recognizes as early as Season 1s Monster Buddies that the Crystal Gems should seek to heal the corruptiondescribed by Garnet as a tear in the fabric of the mindthat causes gems to turn into monsters rather than bubble them indefinitely.

In Season 3s Monster Reunion, Steven discovers that the gem monsters were corrupted by experiencing violence: an analogy that holds true in the real world, where experiencing childhood violence makes people more likely to later commit acts of violence themselves. The quest to heal and release the corrupted gems becomes a major narrative arc of the show, concluding in Change Your Mind when Steven and the Diamonds who were responsible for the violence that created the corruption in the first place work together to begin to repair the harm theyve caused.

But Steven Universes abolitionist ethic isnt limited to pursuing an alternative to bubbling; it also governs how the Crystal Gems reintegrate various antagonists back into society rather than discarding them, even when those antagonists have been responsible for sometimes unimaginable offenses. Lapis Lazuli turned the Crystal Gems over to Peridot, who tried to kill them. Spinel tried to destroy Earth. The Diamonds successfully completed countless whole-world genocides.

Image via Cartoon Network

But Steven recognizes that these antagonists harmful behavior was usually rooted in various traumatic experiences; Lapis and Spinel, for instance, both spent thousands of years abandoned and trapped in isolation. Steven devotes nearly all of his energy towards beginning to heal those traumas, rather than towards punishing the Gems for the harm theyve caused. By the end of the series, Lapis, Peridot, Spinel, and the Diamonds are all in community with Steven and engaged in ongoing reparative and transformational work on themselves and each other.

Steven Universe also recognizes that none of us are immune from engaging in harmful behavior; all of the trauma Steven experiences catches up to him in Steven Universe: Future, and he himself becomes corrupted and turns into a gem monster. But his community, now well-versed in resolving disputes and healing trauma, responds in kind, with Garnet explaining, As long as he believes hes a monster, hell stay one. This community support helps Steven recover his humanity.

In She-Ra, the protagonists similarly avoid a retributive response to characters who engage in harmful behavior. Both Scorpia and later Catra (major foils for Adora and her friends throughout the first three seasons) are welcomed into the Rebellion once they make a commitment to abandon the Horde. And just as in Steven Universe, there is no clearly delineated division between bad antagonists and good protagonists. Entrapta joins the Rebellion, but often seriously hurts her friends and allies with her blind pursuit of technological advancement; Glimmers willingness to use the Heart of Etheria weapon against the wishes of her allies in Season 4 exposes the planet to incredible danger.

Image via Netflix

This is not to say that the reintegration of any of these characters back into their communities is effortless or simple. Both the offenders and those close to them often face a lengthy struggle to process the physical and emotional consequences of the harm done. But because time and resources arent spent on incarceration and retribution, this ongoing, difficult, interpersonal work gets the energy it needs to be successful.

The abolitionist ethics of Steven Universe and She-Ra start with seeing the full humanity of wrongdoers, as opposed to reducing individuals to the worst decisions they have made. It requires a persistence and a dedication to these values. Adora continues to seek to bring Catra back into community despite Catras repeated incalcitrance; Steven makes the same efforts with Peridot and Lapis. It also requires holding offenders accountable to a commitment to repair. Yellow Diamond explained her approach to this commitment, After all the damage Ive done, its only right to use my powers for a little reconstructive work on the gems Ive hurt.

Anyone curious about how safety and accountability might work without the policing and prisons weve come to rely on need look no further than the examples set by Steven Universe and She-Ra. Perhaps the question is not whether we can imagine this kind of world, but whether we have the fortitude to build it.

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Do We Need the Police? 'Steven Universe' and 'She-Ra' Suggest We Don't - Collider.com

Here's what's true no matter how you look at the events of the last week:

Cops and vigilantes are continuing the disproportionate extrajudicial killing of Black people in America.

Police departments around the country are armed with state-of-the art riot gear, and even supplied with decommissioned military equipment (through a program that began under the Clinton administration in the 1990s).

Hundreds of thousands of people are willing to gather en masse despite a global pandemic.

This country is experiencing an economic crisis on a scale unseen since the Great Depression.

One's interpretation of just about everything else that's unfolded as people took to the streets in protest over the police killings of George Floyd in Minnesota, Breonna Taylor in Kentucky, Tony McDade in Florida, and countless others, will depend on one's life experiences, political persuasions, and where one gets information. Narratives of the nationwide protests range from "the peaceful demonstrations were disrupted by unhinged cops who want to sow chaos to discredit the Black Lives Matter movement," to "outside agitators and antifa are instigating riots and looting to destroy America." Amid the chaos of millions of simultaneous events flashing across screens and streets, how might one understand the call to abolish the police?

Police and prison abolitionists, as we've explained over the years, do not subscribe to the idea that policing is somehow "broken" and in need of reforms. They do not see an idyllic past in which policing "worked" for communities of Black, poor, or queer people, for people experiencing domestic violence, housing discrimination, and other forms of state and interpersonal oppression. Instead, abolitionists proposeand indeed demonstrate through their workthat community order can be maintained without the intervention of an armed representative of the government and that justice can be accomplished without punishment.

Abolition can be challenging to imagine because many assume that the absence of harsh punishment for behavior considered to be socially harmful or unacceptable will lead to increased disorder and violence. But abolitionists tend to point out that America's prison-industrial complex and the increasing militarization of police hasn't rooted out endemic pathologies like pedophilia, or mental illnesses that drive people to behave in socially frowned-upon ways, or made people less poor. Indeed, as abolitionist educator and organizer Mariame Kaba often argues, police abolition already exists for the wealthy. In communities with well-funded schools, food security, ample jobs, reliable transportation, and access to health carecommunities where people's needs are metpolice are mostly invisible. "People in Naperville are living abolition right now," Kaba told me in 2016. "The cops are not in their schools, they're not on every street corner." The abolitionist proposal is to redirect the resources the state has allocated toward prisons and police for decades toward community-directed and community-endorsed education, health care, food, jobs, and housing.

"We have this abolitionist framework where we want to see the policing institution dismantled and we want to see it transformed into something that centers community and restorative justice," said organizer Kofi Ademola, an adult mentor with GoodKids MadCity, as he prepared to march in the demonstrations on Saturday. "The minimum [police officer salary] is a good salary to start on. If you gave folks in a community $65,000 a year to keep their communities safe you'd see communities transformed."

But, Ademola said, abolitionist work is gradual and long-term; changing a society that took hundreds of years to reach its current form takes time. "As we reach towards that goal we still have to think about harm reduction," he said. "We don't believe abolition will happen overnight."

Harm reduction usually marshals community resources to fill in gaps left (or created) by the state and the private sector. It takes the form of mutual aid networks that collect money and essential items and redistribute them to people in need, or bail funds that get people accused of crimes out of pretrial detention in dangerous jails, or collectives that offer child care, transportation, and medical services, or reclaiming abandoned land to feed the neighborhood. It may look like charity, but abolitionist organizations tend to eschew the private philanthropic models of large nonprofits which they see as self-serving and out-of-touch with community needs.

On Saturday night, in a move that echoed Mayor Richard J. Daley's cordoning off of Black neighborhoods to confine riots within them after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Mayor Lori Lightfoot decided to kettle thousands of angry people in the Loop. The city lifted bridges, shut down the CTA, and imposed a sudden curfew, as cops brandishing weapons, tear gas, and handcuffs flooded the streets. Abolitionists at the Chicago Freedom School, meanwhile, opened their downtown office to offer shelter, food, and water to stranded protesters. As arrests surged (the city still hasn't been clear on how many people were detained over the weekend, but estimates range from 240 to 1,000), the Chicago Community Bond Fund was raising so much money to bail people out that their website crashed. On Monday morning, as Chicago Public Schools suspended its food distribution program for kids, community groups throughout the city mobilized to make and deliver meals.

"There were all these narratives in the media that Mayor Lightfoot has criticized Minneapolis PD and so I think a lot of people went down with the assumption that our police wouldn't mirror some of the activities we saw in Minnesota," said Richard Wallace, founder of the community organization Equity and Transformation, who participated in the demonstrations. "There are people who might have come to the protests who weren't radical but that left radical, or left abolitionist because of the way the city of Chicago handled that."

The organizers interviewed for this story all said that while the killing of George Floyd may have catalyzed the mass protests, people's rage has deeper roots. The structural, institutional inequities that lead to disproportionate police violence leveled against Black people is also fueling the grim statistics of the COVID-19 pandemic, which is disproportionately claiming Black and Latinx lives. (As Block Club Chicago recently reported, it's also led to disproportionate police enforcement of quarantine rules in Black neighborhoods.)

The pandemic "is laying bare how different our world could be and even more it's laying bare how terrible our world actually is," said Black Lives Matter Chicago organizer Ariel Atkins. "More and more people are being touched by what's happening personally and are way more awake than they have been in a long time . . . watching [the government] save corporations and banks, watching Jeff Bezos become a trillionaire while the people working for him are dying and being overworked and underpaid."

From the vantage point of abolitionists, the disease has also shown that the police, rather than being an institution that promotes safety, is one that's a threat to public health. "It's not insignificant that we had, in recent memory, two Black men whose last words were 'I can't breathe,'" said Page May, cofounder of Assata's Daughters, a youth political education group that runs a community garden to provide free produce to Washington Parkers, among other initiatives. "In a moment where everyone in the world is afraid of a respiratory illness that takes away our breath, it's a metaphor for how we've been living: We can't breathe. There's people on our necks literally and metaphorically."

As protests continue around the country, and the pandemic shows no signs of abatement, abolitionist organizers are expecting interest in their vision to increase. "There are more and more people every day that want to get plugged in and that makes the work more possible," said May. "I think people are seeing that no one is coming to save us and that it's up to us and we're all we got."v

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Police abolitionists find fuel in the protests - Chicago Reader