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Reformist Reforms vs. Abolitionist Steps in Policing

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Reformist Reforms vs. Abolitionist Steps in Policing

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We will be referring to the information in this chart quite a bit in the workshop.

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In 2017, a report compiled by The Center for Popular Democracy, Law for Black Lives and the Black Youth Project 100 analyzed police budgets in major cities across America. Updated data for 2020 has now been released which shows that U.S. police departments are still receiving an astronomical percentage of discretionary funds compared to other crucial community programs. Police budgets remain high in 2020, ranging from 20 to 45 percent of discretionary funding in major metropolitan areas.

The report notes that police funding levels increased in all cities analyzed in the 2017 report (though 2020 data was not available for Minneapolis) and the figures for new cities included in the analysis show that some reform has occurred. Milwaukee is noted as an example where grassroots groups successfully demanded police divestment, which has happened, and the police department's budget is now lower than in previous years.

The same old trends are evident as in previous years in most major cities, however with the NYPD's $5.6 billion budget accounting for 7.7 percent of New York City's general fund. A general fund is used by a city to support municipal services like law enforcement, the fire department and parks, as well as planning, community development and administrative support services.

The share of the general fund is far higher in other cities such as Los Angeles. The LAPD has a 2020 budget of $1.7 billion according to the report and that accounts for over a quarter of the general fund. The share is even higher in Chicago at 37 percent with the total police budget approximately $1.68 billion. In Minneapolis, the city where George Floyd lost his life, the 2017 data shows that the police budget accounted for 35.8 percent of the general fund, totalling $163 million.

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Infographic: How Much Do U.S. Cities Spend On Policing?

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In 2017, a report compiled by The Center for Popular Democracy, Law for Black Lives and the Black Youth Project 100 analyzed police budgets in major cities across America. Updated data for 2020 has now been released which shows that U.S.

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Interactive by Critical Resistance

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Critical Resistance: Beyond the Prison Industrial Complex 1998 Conference

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Police "Reforms" You Should Always Oppose

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Police "Reforms" You Should Always Oppose

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How to spot legislation that increases and decreases police presence and control.

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I read today that President Obama has offered some measures for "reforming" the police.

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Here is a simple guide for evaluating any suggested "reforms" of U.S. policing in this historical moment.

1. Are the proposed reforms allocating more money to the police? If yes, then you should oppose them.
2. Are the proposed reforms advocating for MORE police and policing (under euphemistic terms like "community policing" run out of regular police districts)? If yes, then you should oppose them.
3. Are the proposed reforms primarily technology-focused? If yes, then you should oppose them because:
a. It means more money to the police.
b. Said technology is more likely to be turned against the public than it is to be used against cops.
c. Police violence won't end through technological advances (no matter what someone is selling you).
4. Are the proposed "reforms" focused on individual dialogues with individual cops? And will these "dialogues" be funded with tax dollars? I am never against dialogue. It's good to talk with people. These conversations, however, should not be funded by tax payer money. That money is better spent elsewhere. Additionally, violence is endemic to U.S. policing itself. There are some nice individual people who work in police departments. I've met some of them. But individual dialogue projects reinforce the "bad apples" theory of oppressive policing. This is not a problem of individually terrible officers rather it is a problem of a corrupt and oppressive policing system built on controlling and managing the marginalized while protecting property.

What "reforms" should you support (in the interim) then?

1. Proposals and legislation to offer reparations to victims of police violence and their families.
2. Proposals and legislation to require police officers to carry personal liability insurance to cover costs of brutality or death claims.
3. Proposals and legislation to decrease and redirect policing and prison funds to other social goods.
4. Proposals and legislation for (elected) independent civilian police accountability boards with power to investigate, discipline, fire police officers and administrators. [WITH SOME SERIOUS CAVEATS]
5. Proposals and legislation to disarm the police.
6. Proposals to simplify the process of dissolving existing police departments.
7. Proposals and legislation for data transparency (stops, arrests, budgeting, weapons, etc.)

Ultimately, the only way that we will address oppressive policing is to abolish the police. Therefore all of the "reforms" that focus on strengthening the police or "morphing" policing into something more invisible but still as deadly should be opposed.

This piece was reprinted by Truthout with permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission or license from the source.

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Police "Reforms" You Should Always Oppose

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I read today that President Obama has offered some measures for "reforming" the police. Never miss another story Get the news you want, delivered to your inbox every day. Here is a simple guide for evaluating any suggested "reforms" of U.S. policing in this historical moment. 1.

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The George Floyd Killing in Minneapolis Exposes the Failures of Police Reform

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The George Floyd Killing in Minneapolis Exposes the Failures of Police Reform

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The Intercept

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As protests over the police killing of George Floyd engulfed Minneapolis for a third night on Thursday, and solidarity protests broke out in cities across the country, there was both a sense that the country had been through this before - too many times - and that the stakes had begun to shift.

In the Twin Cities, where Floyd's killing at the hands of officer Derek Chauvin was just the latest in a series of high-profile police killings in the last five years, those who took to the streets in the middle of a coronavirus pandemic were tired and exasperated. Years of misconduct and brutality by local police had brought many protests and much talk of reform. But Floyd's death was an urgent reminder that here, as across the country, police reform had failed, and that the time had come for something different.

"They call for training, but are they doing the training, and is the training being internalized?" said Moriah Stephens, a special education teacher, as she stood near a highway overpass in St. Louis Park, the suburb where Floyd had lived, waving as passing cars honked in support. "I can tell you 50 times over that my life matters and I would like you to speak out about the fact that my life matters, and you can hear me say that 50 times, but are you going to do it?"

"I'm tired of being angry, and I'm tired of being tired, and I'm tired of seeing new hashtags," she added, referring to a recent wave of police killings and other racist incidents across the country. "I'm lucky I'm alive. I can stand here. I can shout. There's part of me that's like, I need to use what I have - I have my life and I need to use it, but I'm also tired of doing that."

Stephens, who had joined protests after the police killings of Philando Castile in a Minneapolis suburb in 2016, said her father was currently undergoing chemotherapy treatment. She was reluctant to go out in the middle of a Covid-19 outbreak that had already taken nearly 1,000 lives in Minnesota, and like many protesters was wearing a mask and standing at a distance from others. "I'm not supposed to be around people. But that's where I'm at."

In Floyd's neighborhood, the signs people carried recalled protests following earlier police killings while also raising new demands. They said "I can't breathe" - George Floyd's last words as Chauvin kneeled on his neck for more than seven minutes, but also the last words of Eric Garner, who was killed six years ago by a New York police officer, igniting a movement against police violence of which Floyd's death is just the latest chapter. After Garner's death, as after the death of Michael Brown the same year in Ferguson, Missouri, and those of scores of other black men and women killed by police since then, protesters called for the officers to be held accountable. But there were new calls at Thursday's protests - such as "Fund Community Not Police" - that tapped into a more recent and growing movement demanding not so much police reform and accountability as abolition, through the defunding of police departments.

"In the wake of George Floyd's murder by MPD officer Derek Chauvin, and the Minneapolis Police Department's escalated violence against the city's grieving Black community, Minneapolis is in desperate need of visionary leadership," the Minneapolis group Reclaim the Block wrote in a statement calling on the city council to defund the police department. "Now is the time to invest in a safe, liberated future for our city. We can't afford to keep funding MPD's attacks on Black lives."

There were signs some local leaders were starting to see it the same way. Under pressure from students, the University of Minnesota announced this week that it would scale back its contract with the Minneapolis Police Department. The University of Minnesota was the first public institution to cut ties with MPD after the killing of George Floyd. On Friday afternoon, Minneapolis public schools board members issued a resolution to terminate the school district's contract with the Minneapolis Police Department. And protesters called for more action to curtail the role of police altogether.

"The system is not broken. It's doing exactly what it was designed to do; that's what people need to wrap their heads around," said Imani Jackson, who grew up in St. Louis Park. "We need to create an entire new one."

Reform Is Not the Answer

In the hours immediately after Floyd's death, it was clear that the national conversation around police violence, set in motion by the killings of Brown and Garner in 2014, had finally begun to change. Chauvin, as well as three officers who had stood by without intervening as he killed Floyd, were promptly fired. Minneapolis Police Chief Medaria Arradondo, who took the helm of the department three years ago following backlash over another police killing, called for an FBI investigation. Mayor Jacob Frey called for the officers to be charged. On Friday, Chauvin was arrested and charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter - a charge that means the officer had no intent to kill and left some protesters disappointed.

"People weren't having it no more," said Sam Martinez, an organizer with the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar. "The system knew that."

A number of law enforcement and elected officials across the country also quickly denounced the Minneapolis officers' actions - public criticism that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

In New York City, where Floyd's death carried echoes of Eric Garner's and where at least 72 protesters were arrested last night in a solidarity demonstration, Police Commissioner Dermot Shea and Mayor Bill de Blasio took to Twitter to condemn Floyd's killing. "What we saw in Minnesota was deeply disturbing. It was wrong," tweeted Shea. "This is not acceptable ANYWHERE." "I am horrified," tweeted de Blasio. "George Floyd was murdered in broad daylight and the man who killed him was a police officer."

De Blasio's and Shea's comments stood in stark contrast with their defense of Daniel Pantaleo, the officer who killed Garner. Pantaleo was fired last summer, five years after Garner's death.

"It took him five years to take any action in the Eric Garner case, and now he wants immediate action in Minneapolis," said Alex Vitale, who runs the Policing and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College, echoing widespread criticism of de Blasio's statement.

Even the National Fraternal Order of Police, the largest police union in the country and a staunch defender of officers involved in killings of unarmed people in the past, released a statement criticizing the Minneapolis officers' actions. "Based on the by-stander's video from this incident, we witnessed a man in distress pleading for help," the group wrote in a statement that was soon echoed by many local chapters of the union. "There is no doubt that this incident has diminished the trust and respect our communities have for the men and women of law enforcement."

But critics warned that the public condemnations, including by law enforcement, were more a matter of political expediency than anything else. "I think that is politically convenient for all of them," said Kandace Montgomery, director of Black Visions Collective, a Minnesota-based racial justice group, which is affiliated with Reclaim the Block and the Movement for Black Lives. "Until they actually offer real solutions and offer real policies that address the inherent violence of police departments, it's all talk."

"That's all well and good, but it means nothing to me until they actually start making concrete changes in how they do business in their police department," echoed Neill Franklin, a retired police major and the executive director of the Law Enforcement Action Partnership. Franklin pointed to the long history of complaints of abuse and excessive force filed against the officers responsible for Floyd's death - and to the fact that reports of police misconduct, nationwide, are kept from public view largely because of union contracts that protect officers no matter their conduct.

"There are police chiefs who are now voicing their disgust about what happened in Minneapolis. Well, how about you now move to make these personnel records public?" said Franklin. "If you really are concerned as a police leader in what's happening, not just with Mr. Floyd, but case after case, rework the union contracts. ... We need to change these laws so that we have the ability to take swift action."

But while calling for greater transparency - including a national database tracking officers terminated for misconduct so they wouldn't just move from department to department - Franklin acknowledged efforts to reform police had largely fallen short.

"Reform is not the answer, we've been trying it for decades, and as you can see, we're just not getting anywhere," he said. "We need a new paradigm of policing in the United States. It needs to be completely dismantled and reconstructed, not changing a policy here or there."

"We are still working with a model of policing in this country that was born out of slavery in this country, that was born out of a white supremacy in this country," he added. "That's why reform won't work and that's why we haven't made any traction whatsoever on this issue of race, as we've seen with the death of Mr. Floyd."

In fact, the swift condemnation of the Minneapolis officers was largely a testament to the deep crisis policing has been facing for years. That crisis was only exacerbated by the current health and economic emergency, which has left communities reeling and feeling that their government, across institutions, has failed them in unprecedented ways.

"Police have realized that their basic legitimacy is being challenged here, and they had better figure out some way to get out from under this," said Vitale, who wrote a book that has both anticipated and informed the growing national movement to defund police. "So if that means throwing a few individual officers under the bus, they are happy to do that."

The reluctance of prosecutors to charge the officers responsible for Floyd's killing was yet another sign of how little has changed. "There is other evidence that doesn't support a criminal charge," said County Attorney Mike Freeman, who compared Floyd's death to that of Freddie Gray, who died in the custody of Baltimore police in 2015 - a rare case in which the officers involved were charged with murder 12 days after the incident. That prosecution was ultimately unsuccessful. "It was a rush to charge, it was a rush to justice," Freeman said of Gray's case, despite the fact that Floyd's death, unlike Gray's, was clearly caught on camera.

"When it's the average citizen who gets arrested and charged for something, the arrest is made immediately as soon as you have probable cause for an arrest," noted Franklin, the retired cop.

In Ferguson, the top prosecutor's refusal to charge officer Darren Wilson in 2014 led to weeks of protests as a grand jury sifted through evidence in the case before declining to bring charges. In Minneapolis, it took three days of protests for Chauvin to be arrested and charged. Some protesters set several buildings on fire, including the Third Precinct headquarters, where Chauvin worked. And as they did after protests erupted in Ferguson, Missouri, police responded to protests of Floyd's death with tear gas and rubber bullets, at one point spraying tear gas out of a moving vehicle onto an apparently peaceful crowd. Several protesters, as well as some journalists, were arrested. Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz mobilized the National Guard, and after Chauvin was arrested, Frey set an 8 p.m. curfew for the weekend. President Donald Trump, as Barack Obama did after Freddie Gray's killing in Baltimore, called protesters who looted stores "thugs" - though unlike Obama, Trump also called for them to be shot.

In fact, Michael Brown's death in Ferguson ushered in an era of police reform that saw federal and local governments invest heavily in police training, including on racial bias, and in technology like body cameras that officials promised would bring about accountability. Floyd's death was yet another reminder that those reforms have failed.

"This is happening after five years of being told, 'Don't worry, we're getting the training,'" said Vitale. "The de-escalation training, the anti-bias training, the mindfulness training ... why aren't things getting any better?"

As evidence mounts of the failures of police reform, some departments and unions are beginning to embrace calls for individual accountability for "bad cops" who they continue to insist are not representatives of their institutions as a whole. But while protesters continue to call for individual officers to be arrested and prosecuted, there is a growing recognition that police misconduct will continue, no matter how many reforms politicians enact, as long as policing exists at the present scale.

"They are desperate. They see that they've got a major credibility problem and that there are active campaigns to take their money away," said Vitale. "This whole idea of jailing killer cops as a way to fix policing is completely naive and misguided. Even when they are convicted, as rare as that is, there's really no evidence that this feeds back into changes in how policing is done."

Reducing the size of police departments by curbing their resources, he and others argue, will be far more effective at reducing police violence than any costly effort to improve the police. "These 'defund and fund alternatives' kinds of movement are much more threatening to police chiefs, which is why I think they are bending over backwards to try to get out ahead of this thing," said Vitale. "People in the movement are shifting: They are not calling for body cameras and more training. More and more people are like, 'Fuck that, take their money away.'"

The Conversation Has Changed

The movement against police brutality took off in Minnesota after police killed Jamar Clark in 2015. The 24-year-old black man was shot in the head by a pair of officers who said they had acted in self-defense, a story some witnesses disputed. In the wake of his death, community members shut down Interstate 94 and occupied the 4th Precinct in North Minneapolis for more than two weeks. Despite intensive organizing by groups like the Twin Cities Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar, an internal investigation by the Minneapolis police department found that the two officers who killed Clark did not so much as violate a department policy.

Since then, local movements have pushed for justice for the families of victim after victim of police violence in Minnesota. Among those killed was Philando Castile, a 32-year-old black motorist pulled over by St. Anthony police in the suburb of Falcon Heights in 2016, whose girlfriend began livestreaming after an officer shot him as Castile reached for his wallet. In 2017, Justine Ruszczyk, also known as Justine Damond, a 40-year-old white woman, was approaching a Minneapolis police car to report a potential sexual assault when a startled police officer shot and killed her. And in 2018, body camera footage revealed Minneapolis police chasing Thurman Blevins, a 31-year-old black man who they said was carrying a gun, and shooting him to death. Jeronimo Yanez, the officer who killed Castile, was acquitted, and prosecutors declined to file charges against the officers who killed Blevins. Mohamed Noor, who killed Ruszczyk, was sentenced to 12 years in prison - a sentence that some felt only came because Ruszczyk was white and Noor is black. Her family was awarded a record $20 million settlement.

At least a dozen police reform bills have failed to make meaningful progress in the state legislature since 2015. The most recent effort began last July, with the appointment of a task force that included police as well as anti-police-brutality organizers. After a series of public hearings, the group released a list of 28 proposals for reform in February, including creating a specialized unit in the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension for investigating instances of deadly force. Then Covid-19 hit, and the follow-up actions required by the state legislature stalled.

On the heels of Michael Brown's death in Ferguson and of a series of other high-profile police killings, in 2014 Minneapolis became one of six cities to pilot the National Initiative for Building Community Trust and Justice - a multimillion-dollar program that was the Obama administration's response to the national call for police accountability. The initiative, widely replicated in police departments across the country, promoted a "community based" approach to policing in response to criticism of so-called broken windows policing and New York-style stop-and-frisk.

"The whole idea was that if police had implicit bias training, so more money for training police, and were using technology for more accountability, and that if police officers were more respectful when they're interacting with the community, that that will promote a better idea of policing, and more cooperation with police," said Nancy Heitzeg, a sociology professor at St. Catherine University in St. Paul, who has studied the initiative.

"That was the theory," she said. "And what does it say about the limits of reform that the city of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis police department could be part of a multi-year, multimillion-dollar national project to enhance police community relations, and after all of that, here we are?"

After years of investment in improved policing with no results to show for it, "the conversation has changed," she added. "There's much more of a public awareness and conversation about abolition, and what that means and what that might look like. ... I think people were radicalized by Jamar Clark and Philando Castile. And then they saw the contradictions around Justine Damond."

Montgomery, the director of Black Visions Collective, said that organizers are tired of just calling for prosecutions. "We're moving past a conversation around prosecuting the police and individual officers - that doesn't change anything. It doesn't prevent another Philando Castile or George Floyd," said Montgomery. "To me and many of my comrades, police reform is irrelevant."

Some demands have shifted to community control. Organizer Sam Martinez told The Intercept that the Coalition for Justice 4 Jamar wants a board similar to a city council or school board to run the police: controlling its budget, approving union contracts, and deciding disciplinary actions. Martinez says the board would have to be fundamentally different from previous civilian police review councils that law enforcement has mostly ignored.

For his part, Mayor Jacob Frey, who critiqued police during an election campaign that took place in the aftermath of Ruszczyk's killing, increased the police budget last year by more than $8 million, part of an effort to put more officers on the street. He has called his brand of police reform "community-oriented" policing, where more officers would build stronger relationships with community members.

Meanwhile, the local police union has maintained powerful sway over the fate of the mayor's tepid reform efforts. This summer, Frey banned police officers from participating in warrior-style trainings that promote an attitude that lethal threats to police are everywhere. Yanez, the officer who killed Castile, had participated in one such training. In response, Minneapolis police union head Bob Kroll, an avid Trump supporter, stated that the union would offer the training free to any officer who wanted it.

Montgomery argues that defunding police is the only meaningful way forward. "For too long we have invested a massive amount of money in an institution that continues to prove itself to be failing and to be inadequate to address the safety needs of our community," said Montgomery. "Defunding is about allocating the abundance of resources we do have to things that have been proven to work" - like housing, health, and education.

On Friday morning, organizers with Reclaim the Block delivered a petition to Minneapolis city council members, demanding that they agree to never again increase the police funding, cut the current budget by $45 million to help manage Covid-19 shortfalls, invest in community-led health and safety strategies, and work to compel the police department to stop inflicting violence on community members. The elected officials were given a deadline of 8 a.m. Saturday to respond.

"My greatest hope is that our city council, our mayor, folks across the country take this opportunity to look at solutions that actually keep us safe and away from the police," said Montgomery. "My fear is that we will settle for something that looks like justice but won't change our future and won't guarantee that we won't have to be doing this in a couple of weeks or months or years."

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The George Floyd Killing Exposes the Failures of Police Reform

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As protests over the police killing of George Floyd engulfed Minneapolis for a third night on Thursday, and solidarity protests broke out in cities across the country, there was both a sense that the country had been through this before - too many times - and that the stakes had begun to shift.

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If you missed class #4, learn more here about our guest speaker.

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The Brutal History Of The Texas Rangers 

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The Brutal History Of The Texas Rangers 

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Interview with Doug Swanson, author of Cult of Glory

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subscribe to Fresh Air podcast

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Their exploits are portrayed in countless movies and TV shows, but author Doug Swanson says the law enforcement agency has a dark history of abuse and officially-sanctioned racial oppression - including burning villages, hunting runaway slaves and murdering Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. Swanson's book is 'Cult of Glory.'

Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead looks at what he calls the "stock jazz-movie ending," a basic plot element subject to many variations.

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The Brutal History Of The Texas Rangers : Fresh Air

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Their exploits are portrayed in countless movies and TV shows, but author Doug Swanson says the law enforcement agency has a dark history of abuse and officially-sanctioned racial oppression - including burning villages, hunting runaway slaves and murdering Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. Swanson's book is 'Cult of Glory.'

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Policing is an Avatar of American Racism

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Policing is an Avatar of American Racism

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In the wake of George Floyd's death at the hands of police, protesters across the country are demanding systemic changes in the way American police forces operate and are funded.

Journalist Jamiles Lartey says the discussion about policing feels different now than it has in the past. "You're hearing so much less of the 'few bad apples' argument and so much more of the, 'What is wrong with this system?' [argument]," he says.

Lartey is a staff writer for The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization that covers the U.S. criminal justice system. He previously reported on criminal justice, race and policing for The Guardian, where he was part of a team that created an online database tracking police violence in 2015 and 2016.

Lartey notes that America's model of policing is a relatively recent phenomenon: "Policing wasn't always this way. It wasn't always this big. It wasn't always this bureaucratic," he says. "Modern policing - the policing that you and I and listeners recognize today - is really a product of the 20th century."

He says that Floyd's death - and the deaths of other black people in police custody - highlight the need to change a broken system.

"There's so many things that we currently ask our police to respond to - whether it's a noise complaint or a car accident - that don't necessarily fit into a reason why someone would need to show up with a deadly weapon," Lartey says. "Sometimes as a society, you need to rethink institutions, especially when they're relatively new, especially when they've changed a lot over the last 20, 30 or 40 years."

Interview highlights
On destructive acts of protest, like looting and arson
I think it is important to keep in mind that to the extent that there has been destructive acts of protests, looting, that there's a range of causes: Are there passionate, angry people who were lashing out in grief and frustration? Yes. Are there anti-capitalists who see looting and destruction as a form of revolutionary praxis and are using this as an opportunity? Yes. Are there pure opportunists who want to get free stuff and are taking advantage of the chaos? Definitely. Are there chaos agents who are trying to give the protesters a bad name and potentially see violence against them? It appears that that was the case as well. So I think it's really important that when we are trying to analyze these moments that we're not reductive about the socio-economic phenomena, like destructive protests or looting. ...

I think there's an important distinction between measuring the efficacy of violent protests or destructive protests versus the morality of it. The morality of it is going to be personal and subjective. Most of us can think of moments and places where we find violence or destruction useful and justified, and moments where we don't. Now, the efficacy of it is something that we can probably wrap our heads around. But again, it's complicated. If the point is to get attention, then destruction works. If the point is to win hearts and minds and the political center, then it probably doesn't. And if holding public officials hostage and forcing them to appease your demands is the point, it might depend on the public official.

I think something that you'll hear a lot ... is that, "Two wrongs don't make a right," which is an ethical and spiritual intuition in many traditions, but it's not a particularly American one. Our whole criminal justice system is based on the premise that two wrongs make a right. Caging humans and fining poor people money they don't have are morally wrong, but it's how we define justice in most cases in this country.
On a model of protest used in the '80s and '90s, where protest organizers met with police beforehand - and why that model is less common now
The negotiated management model of protest is this idea that community thought leaders would be meeting with police. Ahead of a protest, they'd say, "Here's what we're going to protest. Here's when and where and how. This is how we expect it all to go down." And they'd come up with a plan to essentially let people exercise their First Amendment rights in the fullest way possible. And there would be this expectation on both sides that the police would stick to the plan that they agreed to, that the protesters would stick to the plan that they agreed to. This took a lot of the uncertainty and mistrust out of the calculation and allowed people to express themselves. ...

That was in a moment where it was always very clear who community thought leaders were, and in many respects, they were folks who are connected to the establishment ... church leaders, people in the church, the spiritual religious leaders. Now, that's not necessarily the folks who are leading Black Lives Matter protests today. Some of them are. Some of them aren't. So I think there's a lot of reasons why that model has fallen out of favor. I think it largely has to do with the militarization of U.S. police. It largely has to do with just a changing cultural attitude about how police approach their job. But it also has to do with the fact that I think, ideologically and structurally, in many ways, the police and the folks who are protesting are further away from one another within the society, whereas before they were both members of an establishment and a community.
On a softer way of policing protests known as the "Madison model"
I spoke to [former Madison, Wis., Police Chief] David Cooper, who I see is in many ways the forefather of this kind of softer approach to policing protests. ... And what he described to me is you show up in regular uniforms, people can see your face. (This was obviously outside the context of a pandemic.) You listen, you relate. You talk to people about their grievance. And in exchange for asking officers to make themselves fairly vulnerable in this way, you have these more well-equipped cops waiting somewhere close by in case things go bad.

But David Cooper, when I talked to him, he said ... "You never, never, never, never start with the show of force and power because it ratchets up everyone's expectations for violence and ... generate[s] it." And again, just when we think about escalation and de-escalation, that makes sense. You show up with the most aggressive version of how you can respond to something, and it ratchets up the perception of everyone who's there of where this is going to go. ...

Law enforcement officials and former police chiefs told me over and over again [that] just showing up in soft uniforms to a protest full of angry people does not in and of itself guarantee a peaceful, satisfactory resolution. The work starts before that. There needs to be some baseline level of trust between police and between a community that they're going to do what they said they were going to do. If you're talking about one of these pre-negotiated plans for a protest, that they're going to abide by that. There's this metaphorical bank of trust between police and a community, and too often it's overdrawn in both directions, and there's no way to really approach it as anything but a war. As one of the retired law enforcement folks I spoke to said, "The time to make friends is before you need them."
On why reforms within the Minneapolis police department didn't prevent George Floyd's death
Malcolm X once said, "You can't legislate goodwill." And I think it's maybe one of the most astute political observations of our time. And if I can take the liberty of elaborating on it, I'd say you can't regulate goodwill or implement it with a consent decree or a strategic policy initiative either. So, yes, we can outline specific line-level reforms that were promised and not implemented or implemented unevenly or ineffectively.

Let's take neck restraints, for example. Many departments have chosen to ban those outright. But when the Minneapolis police department addressed them in 2014, they chose to leave this carve out where if deadly force was permissible, then so too was this kind of restraint. It maybe makes sense that if you're legally justified to pull out your gun and shoot someone, you're also justified to choke them. That's the argument that's typically made, and a lot of use of force policies make it. But by leaving that carve out, there's a significant ambiguity there in the policy. You're asking officers, in the heat of the moment, or in the heat of several moments, to make a distinction about whether or not this particular situation merits or makes it reasonable to restrain someone's neck in that way.

But putting aside that specific example, a lot of changes were made. The Minneapolis department adopted a slew of changes after this voluntary review in 2013 by the U.S. Department of Justice. And they automated their system for flagging problem officers as the Department of Justice recommended. They rewrote their use of force policy with a focus on the "sanctity of life." They required officers to intervene when a fellow cop became abusive in front of them. And all of those would seem to be measures that would have lessened the possibility that an incident like what happened to George Floyd would happen. But they didn't. And so I think that's going to beg some really tough questions moving forward for reformers about why not.

And I kind of think it comes back to the words of Malcolm X: If there is a culture in an organization whereby the application of force to black bodies is the norm, that's the expectation. It's the M.O. You can't really policy change that away. The news that the city plans to disband its police department and kind of functionally start over again seems to be a recognition of that fact, as does this newfound popularity broadly of defund and abolition movements.

On why screening for racist officers is not going to fix the problem of racism in police departments

I've always found it instructive to think of the police and policing as this kind of avatar of American racism. The police are racism representatives.

I've always found it instructive to think of the police and policing as this kind of avatar of American racism. The police are racism representatives. They are the folks who we hire to actuate something that's far more distant than a person's individual biases.

I'm sure listeners will be familiar with the Central Park incident involving Christian Cooper and Amy Cooper [no relation] a few weeks back: A white woman was walking her dog off leash. This black man, Christian Cooper, asked her to put her dog on the leash, per the park rules. And she instantly seemed to feel very threatened and started calling the police and telling them that she was being physically threatened by a black man. This went viral just before George Floyd was killed.

And part of the reason that the Amy Coopers of the world feel so comfortable using the police as their own kind of personal racism valet is because that's in line with how they've operated in our society. Which is to say, even if you or I or we have never called the police on a black person for some deeply unserious reason, as a society we outsource the keeping of the racial order to police every day. ... And this is so important: Officers themselves do not have to be ideologically white supremacist to be performing that function.

So we spend a lot of time on this surface level question of how do we get police officers as individuals or as departments to treat black people better. But in sum, the way police treat black people in America is symptomatic of how America feels about black people, which is this state of conditional citizenship steeped in mistrust and in fear.
Amy Salit and Seth Kelley produced and edited the audio of this interview. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the Web.

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Policing Is An 'Avatar Of American Racism,' Marshall Project Journalist Says

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In the wake of George Floyd's death at the hands of police, protesters across the country are demanding systemic changes in the way American police forces operate and are funded. Journalist Jamiles Lartey says the discussion about policing feels different now than it has in the past.

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Police Used to Remove People from Land in Louisville, KY

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Police Used to Remove People from Land in Louisville, KY

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A history of police being used to protect land and also remove people from land is a direct throughline to now:  Breonna Taylor's neighborhood is actively being regentrified by the city of Louisville. The police are targeting residents on her street and neighborhood, attempting to disrupt these residences and their lives.

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We Investigated Breonna Taylor's Lawyer's Latest Allegations

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Here is the recording of the event on July 2, featuring Maya Schenwar, Victoria Law, and Mariame Kaba

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"The Black Power Mixtape" Clip with Angela Davis

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"The Black Power Mixtape" Clip with Angela Davis

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13-min clip

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Independent Lens | The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975: Angela Davis | Season 13

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Independent Lens Clip: Season 13 | 13m 5s From 1967 to 1975, Swedish interest in the U.S. civil rights movement peaked. Swedish filmmakers documented the Black Power movement, which was either ignored or portrayed as terrorism by U.S. media. This Community Classroom module analyzes Angela Davis and her profound impact on global liberation movements.

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Smithsonian Channel

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Smithsonian Channel offers powerful documentaries and shows exploring history, science, nature, aviation, space and pop culture. Discover your favorite shows now.

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June Jordan

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At our last class on July 9!

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Voted 2nd best live show in Chicago 2019 only after Lizzo for his Pitchfork performance ( Wilson has toured and opened for a wide range of acts such as Cory Henry, Big Freedia,The Roots, Lil Yatchy, Badbadnotgood, Azealia Banks, All American Rejects, Noname, Alex G, Mr Twin Sister, Kwekcu Collins, RDGLDGRN and more. With festivals under his belt such as Pitchfork, Rolling Loud(SF,LA,Miami), Gov Ball, Fader Fort, Mamby on the Beach, Hopscotch, Otis Mountain Get Down & more Ric is preparing for the release of his first album and to infinity in the new 2020 decade. Ric also, is one of the 8 delegates chosen to travel to Geneva, Switzerland in November of 2014 representing the We Charge Genocide coalition. They successfully presented a shadow report and testified at the United Nations, charging the Chicago Police Department with genocide and torture actions on Black and brown youth within the city of Chicago helping to create a worldwide connection. The trip was covered all over the US and countries foreign including Daily Mail (UK), 20 Minuten (Switzerland), MSN France, Japan Times, Zee News (India), Gulf Times (Qatar), IOL News (South Africa), Straits Times (Singapore), Business Reporter (Pakistan), Breitbart. Ric Wilson is 85 years old. Chicago Tribune), Ric Wilson is a young Chicago stand out that makes party-ready hip-hop with an intelligent twist. Wilson's funk/disco-infused take on rap stimulates both the mind and body with robust percussion, buoyant vocal arrangements and triumphant instrumentation. Wilson's music is playful and poignant, with youthful innocence that's still ever-aware of the difficulties life may throw at you. But instead of lamenting and brooding, Wilson chooses to bask in the beauty of it, dancing through the struggles while remaining acutely aware of his emotions.

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Voted 2nd best live show in Chicago 2019 only after Lizzo for his Pitchfork performance ( Wilson has toured and opened for a wide range of acts such as Cory Henry, Big Freedia,The Roots, Lil Yatchy, Badbadnotgood, Azealia Banks, All American Rejects, Noname, Alex G, Mr Twin Sister, Kwekcu Collins, RDGLDGRN and more.

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Kamau Walton, Critical Resistance

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Kamau Walton, "What's Wrong with Community Control of Police?"

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Noname

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Noname - Shadow Man (feat. Saba, Smino & Phoelix)

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An infographic response to #8CantWait

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The end goal of these reforms is not to create better, friendlier, or more community-oriented police or prisons. Instead, we hope to build toward a society without police or prisons, where communities are equipped to provide for their safety and wellbeing.

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The end goal of these reforms is not to create better, friendlier, or more community-oriented police or prisons. Instead, we hope to build toward a society without police or prisons, where communities are equipped to provide for their safety and wellbeing.

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Created by participant Xivanna!

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William C. Anderson is a writer from Birmingham, Alabama. His work has been published by The Guardian, MTV, Truthout, and Pitchfork, among others. He's co-author of the book As Black as Resistance (AK Press 2018) and was included in the anthologies, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? (Haymarket 2016) and No Selves to Defend. He received his Bachelor's degree in Social Work from the University of Alabama at Birmingham in 2012, where he graduated with Global and Community Leadership Honors.

Contact: wcanorg@gmail.com

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William C. Anderson is a writer from Birmingham, Alabama. His work has been published by The Guardian, MTV, Truthout, and Pitchfork, among others. He's co-author of the book As Black as Resistance (AK Press 2018) and was included in the anthologies, Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?

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Calls to #AbolishICE are counterproductive

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Calls to #AbolishICE are counterproductive

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by Benji Hart (Our guest speaker!)

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A world existed before this criminal justice system was ever conceived of; a world without it is equally conceivable.

In the last month, following the emergence of horrific images of migrant children being separated from their families and held in cages by border agents, the call to #AbolishICE has gone mainstream. Most notably, Congolese immigrant activist Therese Okoumou climbed the Statue of Liberty's base on July 4th following an "Abolish ICE" banner drop, and refused to come down until "all the children [separated from their families and detained at the border] are released."
The thrusting of this message into popular discourse has resulted in widespread discussion of what the dismantling of an entire branch of law enforcement might look like-a truly radical development. Yet, it has also promoted a lack of clarity around how abolition as a political commitment appears in practice, and from whence the call to abolish ICE originates.
Incumbent and established Democrats, from Cynthia Nixon to Mark Pocan, have incorporated the abolition of ICE into their platforms , citing the agency's lack of oversight and short lifespan (Immigration and Customs Enforcement was created in 2003, feeding off anti-Arab and anti-Muslim sentiments in the wake of 9/11). Yet, the primary call of both current and aspiring lawmakers is to redistribute the responsibilities of ICE to other existing departments-treating border-crossers as lower-level criminals rather than threats to national security.

Similarly, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Bronx-born democratic socialist who recently toppled New York congressman Joe Crowley in the Democratic primary for the seat he held, her support for the abolition of ICE, but with calls for a replacement:

Here's what must be done:

We must #abolishICE. It's very structure is about as undemocratic and authoritarian as it gets in the US.

We have to replace ICE with an updated INS-like structure that handles crime through the same court system we've had for well over 100 years. /8

- Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@Ocasio2018) May 26, 2018

Sentiments like these fail to acknowledge that every facet of U.S. immigration policy is rooted in racial exclusion-dating back to RELATED: UCPD's shooting of student in mental health crisis highlights the academy's role in police brutality the Page Act They acknowledged there was no substantive difference between police and ICE. Agents from both organizations communicate and coordinate with one another, taking advantage of the lack of clarity around their respective jurisdictions to target immigrant communities more widely. of 1875-and that the larger court system shares the same legacy of racist violence. They ignore that any charge of authoritarianism leveled at ICE can be applied to any other branch of law enforcement-connections that immigrant activists who heralded the call to #AbolishICE have fought hard to establish. Any argument for the abolition of ICE can-and must-be extended to police, prisons, and the larger criminal justice system. All were founded for the purpose of protecting the wealth and economic interests of the elite, not the safety of the masses.
It was young, queer, undocumented organizers who first created the slogan -insisting that no one deserves to be deported and breaking from the moderate messaging of the larger immigrant justice movement. Working in unison with Black Lives Matter, these organizers named total abolition as the only solution to stop the deportation machine.
A world existed before this criminal justice system was ever conceived of; a world without it is equally conceivable. RELATED: How the state uses "police morale" to divert from the violence inherent to policing
In the wake of Trump's election, organizations like Mijente and Black Youth Project 100 came together under the #ExpandSanctuary campaign, challenging the anti-Black notion that the standard police and prison systems are somehow more humane than ICE. They demanded that Democrats like Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, hiding behind the progressive rhetoric of "sanctuary cities," take concrete steps towards meaningfully protecting Black and Brown communities. The steps suggested included decriminalizing immigrants and people of color, defunding ICE, prisons, and police, and supporting public education, affordable housing, and other social programs.

Support for the formation of each of these arms of criminal justice was galvanized through manufactured racial fears and resentment. Those they target for criminalization are the victims of violence-former slaves, refugees, indigenous people, poor people, survivors of sexual and intimate partner violence-not its source. As a necessary form of reparations, all must be replaced with resources that restore healing and balance to the communities that have been displaced, impoverished, and violated through colonization, enslavement, and war.
While the burgeoning of any new political concept into mainstream consciousness always requires clarification to be made salient and cohesive, it is crucial we distinguish between philosophies which are on their way to becoming avowedly abolitionist, and those mimicking liberatory rhetoric. The latter serves only to restore faith in the entrenched and deeply-racist criminal justice system-whose reach extends far beyond that of any one agency.
Organized Communities Against Deportations appeared at the #KeepFamiliesTogether rally and march last weekend in Chicago as an intervention into the problematic messaging of the event's non-immigrant organizers that called for migrant families to be reunited, but not for the decisive ending of their criminalization nor detention. OCAD member Irene Romulo said from the stage:

Down the streets where we'll be marching, there's hundreds of youth of color that are being incarcerated and disappeared in the county's juvenile detention center. And meanwhile, police in Chicago continue to murder Black people with impunity, separating them from their loved ones forever. Let's extend the same outrage and support we have here to the thousands of people currently incarcerated, separated from their families through prisons and jails. Because even the most criminalized among us deserve to be fought for.

Benji Hart is a Black, queer, femme artist and educator currently living in Chicago. They are the writer behind the blog Radical Faggot, and have essays featured in the anthologies Rebellious Mourning: The Collective Work of Grief (2017) and Taking Sides: Radical Solidarity and the Poverty of Liberalism (2015), both from AK Press. Their writing has also been published in Truthout, Salon Magazine, Socialist Worker, and other feminist and abolitionist media.
The present abuse of migrant youth at the border has pushed some to question the abuse of youth by various other branches of the criminal justice system. Youth detention is often the issue that radicalizes those on the ground to recognize that no one-no matter their identity, background, nor legal status-belongs in a cage. The current call to #AbolishICE must become a call to abolish cages wherever they exist, whoever is inside them.

Honoring the demands of immigrant communities, and staying on message with the organizing that has given us this moment of upheaval means making the connections between ICE and the other racist structures that birthed it. It means fighting for an end to all deportation and detention, the abolition of all systems that make policing and incarceration possible.

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Calls to #AbolishICE are counterproductive unless they are also a call to #AbolishPolice - The Black Youth Project

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A world existed before this criminal justice system was ever conceived of; a world without it is equally conceivable. In the last month, following the emergence of horrific images of migrant children being separated from their families and held in cages by border agents, the call to #AbolishICE has gone mainstream.

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Reformist Reforms vs. Abolitionist Steps in Policing

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Reformist Reforms vs. Abolitionist Steps in Policing

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Created by Critical Resistance

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What Does It Mean to Defund or Abolish the Police?

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What Does It Mean to Defund or Abolish the Police?

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The Daily [Social Distancing] Show

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What Does It Mean to Defund or Abolish the Police? | The Daily Social Distancing Show

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by Benji Hart

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The Trump administration has proposed its first federal budget. As expected, it promises to cut back or remove funding for environmental protection, after-school programs and the arts, while dramatically upping spending on the military, law enforcement and national security. Criticizing it for its shortsightedness and implausibility, a popular statistic cited by its opponents is that it costs more to guard Trump Tower in New York-where Trump's wife and son live in lieu of the White House-for a year than it does to fund the National Endowment for the Arts for the same amount of time.

While the numbers of that statistic have yet to be corroborated, the point stands: The proposed budget exposes not just an imbalance in priorities on the part of those proposing it, but a personal vendetta against social services and environmental protection, designed to enrich the wealthiest at the expense of the majority. Spending on security for Trump Tower and Mar a Lago is wasteful, say opponents, and were those funds freed, they would benefit millions.

I have enjoyed hearing these arguments because, whether those making them realize it or not, they are engaging in abolitionist thinking.

When I say 'abolition', I am not referring (directly) to the movement of the mid 1800s, heralded by ex-slaves and white progressives, to permanently end the institution of chattel slavery. Rather, I am speaking of the modern movement to abolish the prison and police systems as the remaining vestiges of chattel slavery. This growing school of thought is heavily influenced by the original abolitionist movement, and one of its primary tenets is pulling resources from police, prisons and the military and reinvesting them into social services.

While there are jarring political shifts happening in this watershed moment, it's notable that many of the same parties-mainly white liberals-that have called prison and police abolition impossible are now calling for the defunding of the president's private security to bolster arts and education. These are the types of demands Black and Brown organizers have been making for decades, if not much longer.

One of the most surprising points of this argument is from where it suggests funding be cut. While Trump may be one of the most disliked new presidents in history, it's a big deal for a swelling portion of the public to believe that security for the president is not actually that important. It would be easy to make the same arguments that are always used to halt structural shifts: 'It's a matter of national security'; 'Protecting the First Family has to be a priority'; 'Spending these resources shields us from the possibility of greater catastrophe.' Yet, the extreme ludicrousness of the Trump budget is opening up more eyes to something that those on the margins have long understood: 'Safety' is never the true goal of security or militarism, but is always a con meant to protect the interests of power. True safety comes not from amassing weaponry, but from sharing resources.

Last summer, while working as a camp counselor during the week that Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were both shot by law enforcement, I ended up sitting down with a group of almost entirely wealthy, white elementary-aged kids to talk about the police. One of the questions we asked ourselves was why there was so much violence in certain parts of our city, namely on the South and West sides, and not in others. One student suggested that maybe it was because there weren't enough police to protect those neighborhoods.

We sat on the floor of an arts studio in Lincoln Square, a majority white and very wealthy neighborhood on the North side, in which many of the students lived. I asked them how often, when walking to camp, they had seen police cars patrolling the neighborhood, or stopping people on the street. Almost none of them had. I admitted that I hadn't, either.

"If there are so few police in this neighborhood," I asked, "why do we feel safe here?"

It took a moment for the young people to think it through, but they got there on their own: Resources. There was low crime in Lincoln Square because most people there had places to live and good food to eat. There were lots of stores and restaurants, and people could afford to shop and dine there. There were quality schools, libraries, parks and after-school programs, many of them within walking distance from one another. It was access to the basic things people needed, not the presence of police, that made its residents feel secure.

I could have cited the annual city budget, nearly 40% of which is allotted to the Chicago Police Department, compared to around 1% for Chicago Public Schools. (No, that's not a typo.) I could have explained that police keep Lincoln Square safe not by patrolling it, but by containing poverty, homelessness, and mental health crises in other parts of the city. But those truths were not necessary in that moment. What was needed was to help those young people see what many more people of privilege are learning to see: That they already have a clear vision of a world without prisons and police. It's the expansion of that vision which can provide real healing for the US' legacies of violence-in which the police and prison systems are squarely entrenched-and create safety for our cities in their entirety, not just their wealthy, white parts.

The same principle is at play when another privileged person, or their offspring, are let off for committing an unspeakable act of violence, while there are hundreds of thousands of poor, Black and Brown people sitting in prison for doing much less. When a Massachusetts judge recently failed to sentence 18-year-old white athlete David Becker to any jail time for sexually assaulting two women, he said that two years in prison "...would have destroyed this kid's life." This, too, is abolitionist thinking. The injustice is not merely that David Becker didn't go to jail, but that, assuredly, that same judge did sentence countless Black and Brown young people for drug possession or carrying unlicensed weapons, knowing full well he was ruining their lives.

We must ask not simply why Becker didn't go to jail, but why so many others have, when it is common knowledge on the part of its keepers that prison doesn't transform, but merely destroys. We must ask why we continue to use jail time as a response to sexual assault, when the prison system itself relies on sexual violence to intimidate and humiliate the incarcerated, especially when they are women, trans, queer and femme.

This is not to belittle the violence committed by David Becker, or other people of privilege that have evaded incarceration. Abolition asks us to imagine accountability outside of the systems that perpetuate violence, often by inflicting the same harm on perpetrators for which they are being punished. If the wealthy know prison is not what is needed to hold their children accountable, why have they decided it is suited for the children of the poor? If they can survive in a world without prisons, why can't everyone else?

Abolition teaches us to transform our reactions to individual traumatic events into codified political commitments. There is no more salient time than now for us to do so. If we oppose mass deportation under Trump, we must ask ourselves why we didn't speak up when Obama deported more people than any other president in US history. If we oppose Betsy Devos' plans for public education, we must ask ourselves why we didn't resist the same policies when they were instituted by Arne Duncan, Rahm Emanuel, when they only targeted Black and Brown districts, instead of the entire Department of Education. If we find Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric heinous, we must examine how Islamophobia has consistently been used by those in power over the last several decades to justify militarization and invasion across the globe.

If we only oppose bans, only oppose bills, only oppose the individual politicians proposing them, we risk the likelihood of allowing the exact same measures to pass in the future when friendlier faces are pushing them through. Abolition means transforming our desires for change into a commitment to long-term, structural reimaginings. It means understanding that we must terminate, not beautify, the institutions that only cause harm.

A perfect example of these commitments in action is the #DefyDefendExpand campaign, spearheaded by Mijente and Black Youth Project 100. It's a platform which seeks to harness the energy around the sanctuary movement, shaping it into a radical fight against deportation, criminalization and the departments which depend on them. By expanding the idea of what sanctuary means, organizers haven't just created a larger audience for their message, and a wider base of communities with which to organize. They have dramatically shifted the conversation around sanctuary to one not of saviorism, but of resistance and abolition. Sanctuary, they state, is only truly possible when there is no fear of deportation-which logically means the abolition of ICE, of borders, and of all criminalization. This is the philosophy every one of our actions must adopt.

In a pertinent teach-in on the underground railroad held last month in Chicago, facilitator Mariame Kaba laid out the radicalizing impacts of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Up until its passing, free Black people largely sided with white liberals on the question of slavery, opposing it morally but falling on a wide spectrum of opinions around the institution's reform. The 1850 act made it so that escaped slaves were no longer the lost property of their individual masters, but could be put under arrest by any white citizen-effectively making all white people into cops, and placing all Black people-free or not-in danger of incarceration.

This created a dramatic shift, both in Black solidarity and the abolitionist movement. Free Black people could no longer imagine themselves as separate from slaves, as safe from institutional racism by virtue of their class status. Black freedom would necessarily mean opposing the institution of slavery at its core, which meant fighting for its immediate-and not gradual-abolition.

We are experiencing another moment just like that one, of polarization, but also of clarity. Those whose distance from the front lines made it possible to deny their harshness, whose privilege allowed them the luxury of nuance, are now realizing there are clear sides drawn, and the time has come to pick one. We can strengthen our borders, or we can open them. We can ban Muslims, or we can finally identify the true sources of global terror. We can continue to rely on prisons to absorb the costs of our social irresponsibility, or we can equitably fund public schools, affordable housing, free mental health services, universal healthcare.

The fear of a restructured world is merely the fear of change. For, in reality, police- and prison-free zones already exist-just as a world without borders, unbridled mobility, total removal from violence, and unlimited resources, is already real. The problem is this world is only real for transnational corporations, the warmongers, the elite.

Becoming an abolitionist (or acknowledging that you already are one) means demanding that this vision of our world be made real for all.
Special thanks to Iliana Figueroa

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The Trump administration has proposed its first federal budget. As expected, it promises to cut back or remove funding for environmental protection, after-school programs and the arts, while dramatically upping spending on the military, law enforcement and national security.

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The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police

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The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police

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Melissa Gira Grant

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The pandemic has slowed much American police work, but police are still working. "As of May 17, 375 people had been shot and killed by on-duty police officers in 2020-about the same rate as other recent years despite the coronavirus pandemic," Wesley Lowery, who helped track killings at The Washington Post, observed on Tuesday. Just a day before, a 46-year-old black man named George Floyd was killed by a white Minneapolis police officer who pinned him to the ground, kneeling on his neck for five minutes. Floyd's last words were captured in a video on Facebook: " Don't kill me" and "I cannot breathe." Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey swiftly fired the four officers involved and has called for criminal charges.

For all of the promises made post-Ferguson, after ( now former) Officer Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown nearly six years ago, police continue to kill at an undisturbed pace. Each year, police on duty claim the lives of between 900 and 1,100 people, according to the Police Integrity Research Group at Bowling Green State, with fewer than eight, on average, resulting in indictments and even fewer convictions. "The only Minneapolis police officer to be convicted in an on-duty, fatal shooting was Mohamed Noor, who shot and killed Justine Ruszczyk in 2017," reports Minnesota Public Radio. "Noor is black. Ruszczyk was white."

While police kill, their unions rally to their defense. Before Mayor Frey fired the officers involved in Floyd's death, the Minneapolis Police Federation, the local police union, had openly defied him over his barring officers from attending " warrior" trainings, which encourage officers to regard their job as if they were engaged in military combat. One representative course is called " On Killing." These are less a training than an immersion in an alternate reality, in which, as Craig Atkinson, director of the police militarization documentary Do Not Resist, described it, "every single traffic stop could be, might be, the last stop you ever make in your life."

Mayors like Frey, as well as city councils, at least on paper have power over the police. But even when oversight is exercised, police continue to kill and keep their jobs. Now some cities are being urged to take a broader view: to shrink the police force altogether through the power of the budget, particularly at a moment when so many other social programs and essential services are at risk of being cut during a pandemic.

In the summer of 2019, New York Police Department (NYPD) Commissioner James O'Neill fired the officer who killed Eric Garner-who died while being crushed by police attempting to arrest him, while he repeated, "I can't breathe." In response to the officer's termination, police threatened a slowdown in protest, as they did five years earlier, after Garner's death, when protesters took to the streets. Arrests and summons dropped, and so, too, did reports of major crimes. Less policing made the city no less safe. Without meaning to, police provided a case study for police reform advocates.

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The Pandemic Is the Right Time to Defund the Police

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The pandemic has slowed much American police work, but police are still working. "As of May 17, 375 people had been shot and killed by on-duty police officers in 2020-about the same rate as other recent years despite the coronavirus pandemic," Wesley Lowery, who helped track killings at The Washington Post, observed on Tuesday.

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The Police Can’t Solve the Problem. They Are the Problem

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The Police Can’t Solve the Problem. They Are the Problem

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By Derecka Purnell and Marbre Stahly-Butts

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Twenty-five years after the infamous 1994 crime bill, too many criminal justice groups are simply reimagining mass incarceration.

By Derecka Purnell and

Ms. Purnell and Ms. Stahly-Butts are lawyers.

Credit... Sally Deng

A quarter-century on, criminal justice advocates agree that the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed by Bill Clinton in September 1994, was a disaster for poor people and people of color, and a driver of mass incarceration. Elected officials, policy experts and academics have recently sought to undo this damage by reimagining public safety. But too many of them are keeping law enforcement central to their vision for reform. This is a fundamental mistake.They are not reimagining public safety. They are reimagining mass incarceration.

The reality is this: The police fill prisons. We can't repair the harm that the 1994 crime bill has done by promoting mass incarceration without reducing the size and scope of the police.

The crime bill articulated an obsession with punishment and prescribed policing as the cure to a host of social ills. It provided funding for 100,000 new police officers, $14 billion in grants for community-oriented policing, $9.7 billion for prisons and $6.1 billion crime prevention programs. The legislation was partly responsible for a 30 percent increase in police officers from 699,000 in 1990 to 899,000 in 1999, and funded over 7,000 school officers. Today, there are over one million law enforcement officers in the United States

But did the plan work? The Government Accountability Office concluded that while there was a 26 percent decline in overall crime from 1993 to 2000, only 1.3 percent of the decline could be attributed to additional police officers. The majority of that decrease, the office said, came from other, unspecified factors; smaller studies have found that everything from preschool to job programs for young people decreases crime rates.

Approximately 1 0.5 million people are arrested each year in this country. While a majority of these arrests ultimately result in dismissed charges, their impact is devastating. Being arrested, whatever the outcome, can jeopardize a person's employment, housing, physical and mental health and parental rights.

Politicians promise jail closings even as they increase police budgets - and, as a result, arrests. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York has acknowledged that the 1994 crime bill was a mistake and wants the city's Rikers Island jail to close by 2026. Yet New York's transportation agency just announced a plan to hire 500 police officers to combat fare evasion and manage homeless people in the subway.

Free public transportation, living wages and quality housing would be better responses to these issues than increased policing. Nationwide, nearly half of the people whom the police arrest multiple times have incomes below $10,000 a year. It's important to put this in historical perspective: Since it originated with efforts to prevent labor organizing and to patrol slaves, modern policing has punished the poor. No number of diversity workshops, body cameras and community policing initiatives will change that.

Reformers on both sides of the aisle praised President Trump for signing the First Step Act last year as a measure toward ending mass incarceration. The act is a modest, underfunded criminal justice reform package that a coalition of over 150 black led organizations opposed. Last week, White House economists announced a plan to use the police to get homeless people "off the street." This direction is misguided. Police officers cannot solve underlying causes of homelessness or other social problems. They can only temporarily manage these issues with punishment and more violence.

And even more misguided ideas are being proposed. After a movement against police violence erupted in 2014, scholars, nonprofit groups and politicians reimaginedpolice officers as youth mentors, mental health professionals, and social workers - against the wishes of many police officers. But the police do not help vulnerable populations - they make populations vulnerable. Excessive force is the No. 1 investigated complaint against police officers, and sexual violence is the second. People with mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed by the police. People of color, people with disabilities, immigrants, queer and trans people, those with mental illness and the homeless disproportionately experience violence from officers, who kill an average of nearly 1,000 people annually, and sexually assault, physically assault, harass, and surveil hundreds of thousands more

Philanthropists and politicians have called for more "community policing," the idea of having police departments develop partnerships with community groups to ease tensions between law enforcement and residents. In the last 10 years, the Department of Justice included "community policing" in its consent decrees with police departments accused of misconduct in Baltimore, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, Newark, Puerto Rico and Ferguson, Mo., and Oakland, Calif.

But community policing is an empty phrase. A Washington Post report showed that law enforcement use of force increased in half of police departments with consent decrees. Asking police officers to strengthen community relationships - including by doing things like playing football with children or handing out ice cream - does not reduce their power to harm anyone.

There's hope. Community organizations are working to solve the problems our communities face without putting them in more danger. The San Francisco school board recently passed a resolution limiting the role of the police on school campuses, acknowledging that law enforcement's presence criminalizes students under the guise of protection. The Oakland Power Projects trains community members in health skills and emergency response practices to reduce reliance on the police and to create the support networks needed to address the issues that cause problems in the first place.

In New York, the Audre Lorde Project's Safe Outside the System produces resources for L.B.G.T.Q. communities to build safe spaces without police involvement. Nationally, the People's Coalition for Safety and Freedom is organizing for the repeal of the 1994 crime bill and for a community-driven process to decide how to respond to community-based violence and corporate harm.

Systems of oppression, like slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration, must be reduced and abolished - not reimagined. Police officers, who primarily put people in cages, are the enforcers of mass incarceration. We must reckon with the reality that the police are part of the problem and stop investing money, power and legitimacy in them.

Derecka Purnell (@DereckaPurnell) is a human rights lawyer. Marbre Stahly-Butts is the executive director of the Law for Black Lives network of lawyers.
The Times is committed to publishing Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | The Police Can't Solve the Problem. They Are the Problem.

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Twenty-five years after the infamous 1994 crime bill, too many criminal justice groups are simply reimagining mass incarceration. By Derecka Purnell and Ms. Purnell and Ms. Stahly-Butts are lawyers. A quarter-century on, criminal justice advocates agree that the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed by Bill Clinton in September 1994, was a disaster for poor people and people of color, and a driver of mass incarceration.

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It’s Just That I’m Not Really Into Politics  

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It’s Just That I’m Not Really Into Politics  

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Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

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It's Just That I'm Not Really into Politics

by HANIF WILLIS-ABDURRAQIB

violence begets more / violence / or so I've been told / but all of this country's skyscrapers / are still standing / despite the blood / that builds a boat underneath the tongue / after speaking its name / violence begets / more photo opportunities / at the feet of a burning / temple / I show up to the resistance / and someone hands me a rose / the color of surrender / violence begets thirst / a new thing in need / of clean water / once / towards the black / and spotted sky / I raised a fist / inside of a glove / sewn in a country / torn apart by our bombs / I purchased the gloves in a store / after midnight / from a cashier who wore a picture / of her daughter on her chest / and looked as though she might have been crying / before I arrived / violence begets a hunger for warmth / at all costs / I sit in a running car / and count all of the things / yet to be swallowed / by the horned ghosts of empire / If you make your own prison / you can find your own map / to freedom / the smoke from all our engines / is beckoning the sun / close / the oceans are rising / to the height of a child / sitting on a mother's shoulders / pointing to the horizon with a single / trembling / finger

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It's Just That I'm Not Really into Politics - BOAAT PRESS

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by HANIF WILLIS-ABDURRAQIB violence begets more / violence / or so I've been told / but all of this country's skyscrapers / are still standing / despite the blood / that builds a boat underneath the tongue / after speaking its name / violence begets / more photo opportunities /

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Nikki Giovanni

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I was born in the congo
I walked to the fertile crescent and built
the sphinx
I designed a pyramid so tough that a star
that only glows every one hundred years falls
into the center giving divine perfect light
I am bad

I sat on the throne
drinking nectar with allah
I got hot and sent an ice age to europe
to cool my thirst
My oldest daughter is nefertiti
the tears from my birth pains
created the nile
I am a beautiful woman

I gazed on the forest and burned
out the sahara desert
with a packet of goat's meat
and a change of clothes
I crossed it in two hours
I am a gazelle so swift
so swift you can't catch me

For a birthday present when he was three
I gave my son hannibal an elephant
He gave me rome for mother's day
My strength flows ever on

My son noah built new/ark and
I stood proudly at the helm
as we sailed on a soft summer day
I turned myself into myself and was
jesus
men intone my loving name
All praises All praises
I am the one who would save

I sowed diamonds in my back yard
My bowels deliver uranium
the filings from my fingernails are
semi-precious jewels
On a trip north
I caught a cold and blew
My nose giving oil to the arab world
I am so hip even my errors are correct
I sailed west to reach east and had to round off
the earth as I went
The hair from my head thinned and gold was laid
across three continents

I am so perfect so divine so ethereal so surreal
I cannot be comprehended
except by my permission

I mean . . . I . . . can fly
like a bird in the sky . . .

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I was born in the congo I walked to the fertile crescent and built the sphinx I designed a pyramid so tough that a star that only glows every one hundred years falls into the center giving divine perfect light I am bad I sat on the throne drinking nectar

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Patrisse Cullors

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A call to action from Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors

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Bomba Estéreo

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Bomba Estéreo - Internacionales (Official Video)

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The store will not work correctly in the case when cookies are disabled.

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Publisher: Lawrence Hill
Format: Book
Binding: pb
Pages: 274
Released: August 20, 1998
ISBN-13: 9781556520747

On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed the life of a white state trooper. Long a target of J. Edgar Hoover's campaign to defame, infiltrate, and criminalize Black nationalist organizations and their leaders, Shakur was incarcerated for four years prior to her conviction on flimsy evidence in 1977 as an accomplice to murder.

This intensely personal and political autobiography belies the fearsome image of JoAnne Chesimard long projected by the media and the state. With wit and candor, Assata Shakur recounts the experiences that led her to a life of activism and portrays the strengths, weaknesses, and eventual demise of Black and White revolutionary groups at the hand of government officials. The result is a signal contribution to the literature about growing up Black in America that has already taken its place alongside The Autobiography of Malcolm X and the works of Maya Angelou.

Two years after her conviction, Assata Shakur escaped from prison. She was given political asylum by Cuba, where she still resides.

Join the Friends of AK Press and
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we publish!

Join Today

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On May 2, 1973, Black Panther Assata Shakur (aka JoAnne Chesimard) lay in a hospital, close to death, handcuffed to her bed, while local, state, and federal police attempted to question her about the shootout on the New Jersey Turnpike that had claimed th

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Short episodes to support growing activist leaders!

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A podcast about taking political action guided by the concepts of direct action, solidarity, autonomy and mutual aid.

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Created by participant Xivanna!

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Ric Wilson

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Jamila Woods featuring Noname

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Jamila Woods- VRY BLK ft Noname (prod.  by oddCouple and Kweku Collins)

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Janelle Monae et al LIVE

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Janelle Monae & Wondaland - Hell You Talmbout (Eephus Tour Philadelphia 8-12-15)

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Cover at David Byrne's "American Utopia" (band members from 10 different countries)

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David Byrne - Hell You Talmbout [Janelle Monáe cover] (Houston 04.28.18) HD

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Attitudes and laws around U.S. immigration have vacillated between welcoming and restrictive since the country's beginning.

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U.S. Immigration Timeline: Definition & Reform - HISTORY

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A timeline of U.S. immigration shows how, from the 1600s to today, the United States became a nation of people from hundreds of cultures, languages and beliefs.

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The dark history of "gasoline baths" at the border

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The dark history of "gasoline baths" at the border

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15-min video

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The dark history of "gasoline baths" at the border

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Who Profits from Immigration Enforcement? 

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Who Profits from Immigration Enforcement? 

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6 minutes

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Who Profits From Immigration Enforcement?

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The Bath Riots: Indignity Along the Mexican Border : NPR

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The Bath Riots: Indignity Along the Mexican Border : NPR

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(OPTIONAL) 9-min listen

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For decades, U.S. health authorities used noxious, often toxic chemicals to delouse Mexicans seeking to cross the border into the United States. A new book tells the story of what happened when a 17-year-old Mexican maid refused to take a gasoline bath and convinced 30 other trolley passengers in 1917 to do the same.

At the customs bath by the bridge... they would spray some stuff on you. It was white and would run down your body. How horrible! And then I remember something else about it: they would shave everyone's head... men, women, everybody. They would bathe you again with cryolite. That was an extreme measure. The substance was very strong.

The maid, Carmelita Torres, crossed every day from Juarez to El Paso to clean American homes. The gasoline bath was noxious, but effective at killing lice, which carry typhus, says David Dorado Romo, an El Paso, Texas, author whose new book is called Ringside Seat to a Revolution. Before being allowed to cross, Mexicans had to bathe, strip nude for an inspection, undergo the lice treatment, and have their clothes treated in a steam dryer.

When Torres and the others resisted the humiliating procedure, onlookers began protesting, sparking what became known as the Bath Riots.

The Mexican housekeepers who revolted had good cause to be upset. Inside a brick disinfectant building under the bridge, health personnel had been secretly photographing women in the nude and posting the snapshots in a local cantina. A year earlier, a group of prisoners in the El Paso jail died in a fire while being deloused with gasoline.

U.S. and Mexican troops eventually quelled the riot, and young Torres was arrested. Though she's been compared to Rosa Parks, Torres' protest had little effect, Romo says.

The baths and fumigations (DDT and other insecticides were later used) continued for decades, long after the Mexican typhus scare ended. The practice was finally discontinued as health authorities realized the chemicals were dangerous.

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The Bath Riots: Indignity Along the Mexican Border

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For decades, U.S. health authorities used noxious chemicals to delouse Mexicans at border crossings. A new book details violence that followed a 17-year-old Mexican maid's refusal to take a gasoline bath.

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The Racist History of US Immigration Policies 

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The Racist History of US Immigration Policies 

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(OPTIONAL) 3 minutes

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The racist history of US immigration policy

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A vital and influential exploration of the rapid militarization of the police in the United States. Do Not Resist puts viewers in the center of the action - from inside a police training seminar that teaches the importance of "righteous violence" to the floor of a congressional hearing on the proliferation of military equipment in small-town police departments. Winner, Best Documentary Feature Award, 2016 Tribeca Film Festival.

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A vital and influential exploration of the rapid militarization of the police in the United States. Do Not Resist puts viewers in the center of the action - from inside a police training seminar that teaches the importance of "righteous violence" to the floor of a congressional hearing on the proliferation of military equipment in small-town police departments.

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A Decade Of Watching Black People Die : Code Switch

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The last few weeks have been filled with devastating news — stories about the police killing black people. At this point, these calamities feel familiar — so familiar, in fact, that their details have begun to echo each other.

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Read this piece by Alex S. Vitale if you don't have capacity to read The End of Policing.

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The Invisible Institute - Chicago

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The Citizens Police Data Project (CPDP.co) is a tool for holding police accountable to the public they serve.

CPDP takes records of police interactions with the public - records that would otherwise be buried in internal databases - and opens them up to make the data useful to the public, creating a permanent record for every CPD police officer.

We've built CPDP with a focus on making data both accessible and useful by collaborating closely with the people who can best make use of it. If you've used CPDP and you're open to talking with us about your experience, please join our feedback community or click on the live chat bubble in the bottom-right corner to reach out at any time.

The codebase and the growing collection of underlying datasets plus data processing scripts and the original FOIA responses are available publicly here:

Originally intended to serve as a national model for transparency, the Citizens Police Data Project emerged from a decade-long collaboration with the University of Chicago Law School's Mandel Legal Aid Clinic. CPDP is now the hub of several inter-woven projects and partnerships that share the common goal of making police data more useful to the public through transparency, investigation, and accountability.

Our work on CPDP today can be organized into three key areas.

Strengthening the core frameworks by building out a modular open-source infrastructure for complaint data management, investigative data tools, and data processing pipelines. Apart from becoming more efficient at keeping the information on CPDP up-to-date for the thousands of investigative journalists, community organizers, and civil rights attorneys who rely on it every day, we are also working together with partners who are upstream and downstream in the life cycle of our data. This means helping officials in civilian oversight to improve data quality at the point of initial intake (upstream), and delivering critically useful information about police officers directly into the workflows of public defenders by integrating with their existing work tools (downstream).

Deepening the investigation by enabling theme-based NLP text analysis capabilities for a growing library of 230,000+ pages of complaint documents now being released through the Green v. Chicago lawsuit, creating tools to explore the networks dimension of misconduct data through our research partnership with the N3 Initiative at Northwestern University, and introducing a new dataset of police lawsuits (and settlements) through our partnership with the Chicago Reporter.

Expanding the impact by cultivating our network of partners/allies in other cities (New Orleans, Dallas, New York City, Oakland, San Francisco, Washington, D.C.) and working together with community stakeholders to develop strategies for deploying these public tools and implementing best practices in open data stewardship.

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Citizens Police Data Project - Invisible Institute

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We've built CPDP with a focus on making data both accessible and useful by collaborating closely with the people who can best make use of it. If you've used CPDP and you're open to talking with us about your experience, please join our feedback community or click on the live chat bubble in the bottom-right corner to reach out at any time.

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A Community Compilation on Police Abolition

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A Community Compilation on Police Abolition

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By Sarah-Ji and Monica Trinidad of the For the People Artists Collective

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Created for the opening of the Gone But Not Forgotten Quilt exhibit on October 17, 2016, this zine was created by Monica Trinidad and Sarah-... See More

Created for the opening of the Gone But Not Forgotten Quilt exhibit on October 17, 2016, this zine was created by Monica Trinidad and Sarah-... See More

Connecting content to people.

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A Community Compilation on Police Abolition

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Created for the opening of the Gone But Not Forgotten Quilt exhibit on October 17, 2016, this zine was created by Monica Trinidad and Sarah-Ji of For The People Artists Collective and Rachel Wallis, the artist and curator of GBNF Quilt Project.

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Reformist Reforms vs. Abolitionist Steps in Policing

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Reformist Reforms vs. Abolitionist Steps in Policing

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Created by Critical Resistance

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An essay by Mariame Kaba

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This essay will appear in July's "Fun" magazine issue. Subscribe now to get it in your inbox.

"Ms. K, they got me again."

Six words set up the familiar routine. A car ride to the station. An unwanted and unwelcome conversation with the officer at the desk. Rudeness, contempt and that awful perma-smirk. Waiting in anticipation; false alarms. A reprieve: An escape without ransom. More waiting. Finally, the bowed head and slumped shoulders of a young Black man walking towards me. No tears. Where are the tears? Another court date or maybe not. Another record to expunge, always. Then it starts all over again.

I dread summer. It's the season of hyper-surveillance and even more aggressive policing of young people of color in my neighborhood.

The urban summer criminalization merry-go-round; a kind of demented child's play. Quotidian terrorism in the service of law and order. Low-intensity police riots against young Black people. My anecdotal observations are supported by empirical data. The ACLU of Illinois says that last summer, based on population, Chicago police made "far more street stops than New York City police did at the height of their use of stop-and-frisk. The CPD stopped more than 250,000 innocent people." Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of those stops involved Black people who, while making up 32% of Chicago's population, were 72% of the stops.

Some studies suggest a correlation between summer and a rise in "crime." I can hear the justifications: "If crime increases in the summer, then more police aggression is justified." This fails to take into account that "routine" interactions between police and young people in my community are fraught all year long. Summer exacerbates these oppressive contacts because many more young people are out of school and usually without jobs hanging out in public spaces.

Public spaces in urban and suburban towns are contested. Residents collude with law enforcement to police and enforce boundaries. Young people of color are criminalized not only by the police but also by community residents.

Yesterday, yet another video went viral on social media. It depicts police officers in McKinney, Texas, swarming a pool party filled with teenagers and one particular officer manhandling a 14 year old Black girl wearing a bikini. The young people are cursed at, have a gun pointed at them, and are taunted for being afraid of the cops. Fifteen year old Miles Jai Thomas explains what happened:

"So a cop grabbed her arm and flipped her to the ground after she and him were arguing about him cursing at us," Thomas said.

When two teens went toward the cop to help the girl, they were accused of sneaking up on the cop to attack.

"So a cop yelled 'get those motherfuckers' and they chased [us] with guns out. That's why in the video I started running," Thomas said.

I was scared because all I could think was, 'Don't shoot me,'" he said.

Watching the video, I was struck by how the young people were denied the right to be afraid. Their fear was illegitimate. And it makes sense; only human beings are allowed to be afraid. For the cops these youth of color (mostly Black) are not human.

I dread summer.

I attended a conference recently about youth/police interactions. The familiar trope about the need for young people and the cops to get to know each other was bandied about, useless pablum offered as a solution for ending police violence which relies on a faulty definition of the problem. As a young person once told me: "I know the cops here very well and they know me. We know each other too well. That's not the problem. The problem is that they harass me daily. If they'd stop that, we'd be fine."

The young people in my community who come into contact with the police can recite their names and badge numbers. Those are unforgettable to them; the stuff of their nightmares. It's unclear to me how more conversations will change the dynamics of such oppression. For most of the public, whether liberal or conservative, it's the cops' job to arrest people, and they are incentivized to do that work. Presumably, then, what would need to change to shift the dynamics are the job descriptions and the incentives.

A persistent and seemingly endemic feature of U.S. society is the conflation of Blackness and criminality. William Patterson, a well-known Black communist, wrote in 1970 that: "A false brand of criminality is constantly stamped on the brow of Black youth by the courts and systematically kept there creating the fiction that Blacks are criminally minded people." He added that "...the lies against Blacks are propped up ideologically." I would suggest that they are also maintained and enforced through force and violence.

When the Baltimore police dressed in riot gear turned their violence on high school students at the Mondawmin Mall a few weeks ago, some people were horrified. "These are children," onlookers exclaimed on social media. I thought grimly of how the cops would see the situation: There are no children here; only targets and threats. Social science research suggests that cops see Black children as older and as less innocent than their white peers. The research confirms what most of us already know: Black children are considered to be disposable and dangerous mini-adults.

This is not new. I came across the story of 13-year-old Beverly Lee when I read the 1951 We Charge Genocide petition many years ago. Lee was shot in the back by a Detroit police officer on October 12, 1947. Here's the item that piqued my interest as it appeared in We Charge Genocide:

Beverly Lee, 13-year-old youth, was shot by Policeman Louis Begin of Detroit, Michigan. Mrs. Francis Vonbatten of 1839 Pine testified that she saw the dead youth and another walking down the street, saw the squad car approach. She heard "Stop, you little so-and-so" and then a shot. The officer was subsequently cleared by Coroner Lloyd K. Babcock.

I was particularly interested in the incident because I thought that Beverly was a girl and police violence cases involving Black girls and young women have been overlooked. In fact, I haven't found any historical incidents of police violence against Black women and girls that led to mass mobilization. Current campaigns such as #SayHerName point to the enduring erasure of state violence against Black girls and women.The incident in McKinney Texas featured physical violence against a Black girl underscoring the fact that girls (cis and trans) are consistently at risk of law enforcement abuse. On further research, I learned that Beverly Lee was actually a boy.

On the day after Beverly Lee was shot, the Detroit News reported on the incident:

Shot in the back as he tried to evade arrest, a seventh-grade schoolboy was killed by a Detroit patrolman late Sunday. The boy, Beverly Lee, 13, of 2637 Twelfth street, was shot by Patrolman Louis Begin, of the Trumbull station, when he disregarded orders to halt. Begin and his partner, Patrolman William Owens, were called to Temple and Vermont avenues where Mrs. Mabel Gee, 1930 Temple, reported her purse stolen. Approaching the intersection, they saw Lee, ordered him to halt, and Owens fired a warning shot. Begin shot him as he continued to run away from the scout car. A watch belonging to Mrs. Gee and $18, the amount she said was in her purse, were found in the boy's pockets. The purse was recovered nearby. Begin and Owens made statements to William D. Brusstar, assistant prosecutor. They said Mrs. Gee referred to her assailant as a "man" and, when they encountered him, they thought he was an adult [emphasis mine]. Lee was about five feet, six inches tall. Other victims of recent purse snatchings were being invited to view the body at the County Morgue. Lee attended Condon Intermediate School. His body was identified by his mother, Mrs. Leah Lee. [10/13/47]

The discrepancy between these two accounts is unsurprising. As we have so often seen, there is usually a variance between initial press reports and official police accounts and community narratives. Notice that the cops and the alleged robbery victim said that they thought Lee was an adult. The adultification of black children has long and deep roots that date back to chattel slavery. In fact, before the Civil War, half of all enslaved people were under 16 years old. Enslaved children were property and were expected to work. Children as young as 6 years old worked the fields.

Beverly Lee was the third black boy killed by police that year in Detroit. Community members were furious and organized protests over Lee's killing. Despite the uproar, only eight days after the shooting, the prosecutor closed the investigation into Lee's death calling it "justifiable homicide." The Detroit NAACP met with the prosecutor and called for an inquest into the facts to the case. They presented him with signed statements of witnesses who contradicted his findings. It appears that the community, led by the NAACP, continued to organize around Lee's case without any success at bringing charges against Officer Begin. Police impunity has a long history in this country. In the end, a 13 year old Black boy was shot in the back by police and died. To quote Ossie Davis, black people understand that "we live with death and it is ours."

***

Most often, it's police shootings and killings that spark urban uprisings. However, the daily indignities and more invisible harms are ever-present and are the foundation of hostilities between young people of color and police. Routine state violence carried out by the police happens outside of public view under the guise of addressing gun and other forms of violence. If past is prologue, my community can look forward to another summer of intense, relentless, and surely illegal police harassment of young people of color and specifically of young black men.

Young people riding their bikes on sidewalks, instead of being ticketed as prescribed by law, will be hauled into police lockups where they'll be accused of resisting arrest and then funneled into Cook County jail. Teenagers leaving summer programming will be followed by cop cars and asked where they are heading. One cross word will lead to being roughly thrown on car hoods in front of the whole neighborhood. Walking through alleys as a short cut to head home from work, young people will be hounded, provoked, dragged to the station - but not before being beaten in the car without any concern for health conditions like seizures. Trans and gender non-conforming youth will be bullied and verbally harassed for walking down the street. Young people will be picked up without cause and driven into rival gang territory where they will be dumped without wallets or phones only to hear the cops announcing for all to hear that they belong to the rival gang. Young women walking down the street minding their own business will be sexually harassed by those sworn to "protect and serve."

I dread summer.

Besides stops and frisks and other violations, young people in my community are also subjected to warrantless searches of their homes. One young person I know narrated his experience in the 2014 We Charge Genocide report to the United Nations Committee Against Torture (UNCAT):

We're sitting in a house playing video games and we hear a banging on the door. Before we know it, the door is kicked down and there's five special-ops officers with their huge M16s drawn, pointed at us: Three 15 year olds playing video games. And they tell us get on the ground. They say if we move they are gonna kill us; "Don't look at me, we'll fucking kill you in a second!" Pointing their guns at us. Then they don't find anything. They let us all go, they laugh, try to joke with us, apologize, then leave out. And we're sitting there like, "What just happened?" They tear up the house. They stole money...

Lest you think that this is an innovation of zero tolerance militarized policing born out of the war on drugs, here's an example from 80 years ago. When the people of Harlem rioted in 1935, it was once again an incident of police violence that lit the fuse. A rumor that Lino Rivera, a 16-year-old Black Puerto Rican young man, was killed by New York City Police led to nearly 4,000 Harlemites taking to the streets. 700 police officers were dispatched to the community. When all was said and done, three people had died and over $200 million in damages were sustained from the riot. In the aftermath, Mayor LaGuardia commissioned a report to understand the causes of the uprising. In a section titled "The Police in Harlem," the report's authors maintained that cops routinely entered the homes of Black Harlemites "without a warrant and searched them at will." Instead of drugs, Harlem cops in the 1930s were searching for policy slips in an effort to crack down on illegal gambling. Reprinted in the report was a letter by a Harlem resident addressed to the Mayor. Below are a few excerpts:

On Tuesday morning, April 16, 1935, between 10 and 11 o'clock, the superintendent of the house rapped at my door. Upon opening it, I was confronted with three men (men in civilian clothes) who the superintendent said were policemen. He explained that the men were searching the house, for what he did not know.

The men entered the room, and proceeded to search without showing shields or search warrant. I asked twice of two of the men what was the reason for such action. I received no answer from any of them.

My dresser drawers were thoroughly gone into, dresser cover even being raised. My bed came in for similar search, covers were dragged off and mattress overturned. Suitcase under my bed was brought up and searched. My overcoat hanging on the door was gone over and into. My china closet was opened and glassware examined. After this startling act the men left my room, still without saying a word.

These types of violations span centuries for Black people, and are one reason for a racial disconnect in discussions about privacy and civil liberties. Black people have always been under the gaze of the state and we know that our rights are routinely violable. Civil liberties and individual rights have different meanings for different groups of people. They also have different priorities depending on social contexts. A review of Black history suggests that considerations of civil liberties are always embedded within concepts of equality and social justice. In other words, by design or necessity, Black people have focused on our collective rights over our individual liberties. This makes sense in a society where we don't just assume individual Black guilt and suspicion: We are all guilty and we are all suspicious (even if we may want to deny this reality). In that context, individual liberties and rights take a back seat to a collective struggle for emancipation and freedom. Additionally, as a people, we have always known that it is impossible for us to exercise our individual rights within a context of more generalized social, economic, and political oppression.

History offers evidence of the intractability of the problem of police violence. What should we do then? Quite simply, we must end the police. The hegemony of police is so complete that we often can't begin to imagine a world without the institution. We are too reliant on the police. In fact, the police increase their legitimacy through all of the non-police related "work" that they assume: including doing "wellness" and "mental health checks." Why should armed people be deployed to do the work of community members and social workers? Why have we become so comfortable with ceding so much power to the police? Any discussion of reform must begin with the following questions: How will we decrease the numbers of police, and how will we defund the institution?

On the way to abolition, we can take a number of intermediate steps to shrink the police force and to restructure our relationships with each other. These include:

1. Organizing for dramatic decreases of police budgets and redirecting those funds to other social goods ( Defunding the police).

2. Ending cash bail

3. Overturning police bills of rights.

4. Abolishing police unions.

5. Crowding out the police in our communities.

6. Disarming the police.

7. Creating abolitionist messages that penetrate the public consciousness to disrupt the idea that cops=safety.

8. Building community-based interventions that address harms without relying on police.

9. Evaluating any reforms based on these criteria.

10. Thinking through the end of the police and imagining alternatives.

Importantly, we must reject all talk about policing and the overall criminal punishment system being "broken" or "not working." By rhetorically constructing the criminal punishment system as "broken," reform is reaffirmed and abolition is painted as unrealistic and unworkable. Those of us who maintain that reform is actually impossible within the current context are positioned as unreasonable and naïve. Ideological formations often operate invisibly to delineate and define what is acceptable discourse. Challenges to dominant ideological formations about "justice" are met with anger, ridicule or are simply ignored. This is in the service of those who benefit from the current system and to enforce white supremacy and anti-blackness. The losers under this injustice system are the young people I know and love.

I really dread summer...

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This essay will appear in July's "Fun" magazine issue. Subscribe now to get it in your inbox. "Ms. K, they got me again." Six words set up the familiar routine. A car ride to the station. An unwanted and unwelcome conversation with the officer at the desk. Rudeness, contempt and that awful perma-smirk.

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Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore 

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Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore 

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Video - The intricate connection between capitalism and racism.

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Geographies of Racial Capitalism with Ruth Wilson Gilmore – An Antipode Foundation film

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Eyes on the Prize Episode 12: A Nation of Law? 

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Eyes on the Prize Episode 12: A Nation of Law? 

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This episode covers the Chicago police murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and Attica Prison Riots.

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Eyes on the prize - 12 - A Nation of Law? (1968-1971)

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A NATION OF LAW? (1968-71) - Black activism is increasingly met with a sometimes violent and unethical response from local and federal law enforcement agencies. In Chicago, two Black Panther Party leaders are killed in a pre-dawn raid by police acting on information supplied by an FBI informant. In the wake of President Nixon's call to "law and order," stepped-up arrests push the already poor conditions at New York's Attica State Prison to the limit. A five-day inmate takeover calling the public's attention to the conditions leaves 43 men dead: four killed by inmates, 39 by police.

UMA NAÇÃO DA LEI? (1968-1971) - O ativismo negro se deparou cada vez mais com uma resposta, por vezes violenta e sem ética, das agências de aplicação da lei local e federal. Em Chicago, dois líderes do partido Panteras Negras são mortos em um ataque da madrugada por policiais atuando a partir de informações fornecidas por um informante do FBI. Na esteira do apelo do presidente Nixon por "lei e ordem", a retomada dos aprisionamentos levou ao limite as condições já precárias da prisão estadual de Attica (estado de Nova Iorque). O motim de cinco dias, que chamou a atenção do público para estas condições, deixou 43 homens mortos: quatro mortos por detentos, 39 pela polícia.

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New Georgia Encylopedia

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Beginning in 1757 Georgia's colonial assembly required white landowners and residents to serve as slave patrols.

Asserting that slave insurrections must be prevented, the legislature stipulated in "An Act for Establishing and Regulating of Patrols" that groups "not exceeding seven" would work in districts twelve miles square. The statute, modeled on South Carolina's earlier patrol law, ordered white adults to ride the roads at night, stopping all slaves they encountered and making them prove that they were engaged in lawful activities. Patrollers required slaves to produce a pass, which stated their owner's name as well as where and when they were allowed to be away from the plantation and for how long. Patrols operated in Georgia until slavery was abolished at the end of the Civil War (1861-65).

Whites could hire substitutes to patrol for them; absentees were fined. Much of the burden of patrol duty fell to nonslaveholders, who often resented what they sometimes saw as service to the planter class. The Chatham County grand jury complained in the mid-1790s about the difficulty it faced in enforcing the patrol requirement. By the early nineteenth century it became necessary to pay people to perform what had been voluntary unpaid service. In 1819 Savannah's city watch received one dollar for every evening they served and shared in any reward for the forced return of fugitive slaves.

To disperse any nighttime meetings, patrollers visited places where slaves often gathered. Owners feared such gatherings allowed slaves to trade stolen goods for liquor and other forbidden items.

River patrols were organized in Savannah and Augusta to combat "midnight depredations" and to protect cargo, crops, and other materials piled along waterfront docks from slave theft. Religious meetings were also a favorite haunt of patrollers because they provided opportunities for socializing that attracted slaves. After 1792 Georgia law protected religious assemblies from being disturbed, but slaves and African Americans could not gather "under pretence of divine worship" contrary to the regulation of patrols. Paranoia over slave unrest after the Saint Domingue (later, Haiti) slave rebellion of 1791 led to a Savannah ordinance that no slaves could meet for religious services without a white preacher present.

Slave patrols had the legal right to enter, without warrant, the plantation grounds of any Georgian; they often searched the slave quarters and inspected slave homes, looking for stolen goods, missing slaves who had turned runaway, weapons that could be used in an insurrection, or evidence of literacy and education, including books, papers, and pens (teaching a slave to read was forbidden by Georgia law in the antebellum period). Enforcement was often more lax than the letter of the law suggested. For instance, in Greene County, in the heart of the plantation Black Belt, the grand jury complained about the laxity of the patrols and their failure to provide effective vigilance over the county's vast slave populace.

In towns and growing cities like Savannah, Macon, and Augusta, slave patrollers usually did their work on foot, and the men chosen as urban patrols were not always well-to-do. The responsibilities of city patrollers occasionally merged with those associated with modern-day policemen and firemen: patrollers investigated strange circumstances (moving lights in a warehouse at night, rowdy gatheringsin drinking dens, anyone who acted suspiciously). Indeed, urban patrollers preceded the advent of city policeman and fireman forces in virtually every southern town.

With the Civil War's outbreak in 1861, white Georgians feared the possibility that slaves would rebel or that enforcing discipline among slave communities would become more difficult. As a result, patrols, often in conjunction with home militia units, intensified their vigilance. Apprehension increased after U.S. president Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation went into effect in 1863, and the movement and behavior of slaves were more strictly regulated. In Atlanta, for example, patrols began arresting any blacks found on the streets after nine o'clock at night, whether or not they had passes. City authorities also prevented social gatherings of African Americans unless patrollers or policemen were present.

Although slave patrols ceased to function after the Civil War, they provided the blueprint for later activities of the Ku Klux Klan -a new means by which the white community sought to control the activities of freedmen and freedwomen during Reconstruction.

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Beginning in 1757 Georgia's colonial assembly required white landowners and residents to serve as slave patrols. Asserting that slave insurrections must be prevented, the legislature stipulated in "An Act for Establishing and Regulating of Patrols" that groups "not exceeding seven" would work in districts twelve miles square.

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Eyes on the Prize Episode 12: A Nation of Law? 

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Eyes on the Prize Episode 12: A Nation of Law? 

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This episode covers the Chicago police murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark and Attica Prison Riots.

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Eyes on the prize - 12 - A Nation of Law? (1968-1971)

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A NATION OF LAW? (1968-71) - Black activism is increasingly met with a sometimes violent and unethical response from local and federal law enforcement agencies. In Chicago, two Black Panther Party leaders are killed in a pre-dawn raid by police acting on information supplied by an FBI informant. In the wake of President Nixon's call to "law and order," stepped-up arrests push the already poor conditions at New York's Attica State Prison to the limit. A five-day inmate takeover calling the public's attention to the conditions leaves 43 men dead: four killed by inmates, 39 by police.

UMA NAÇÃO DA LEI? (1968-1971) - O ativismo negro se deparou cada vez mais com uma resposta, por vezes violenta e sem ética, das agências de aplicação da lei local e federal. Em Chicago, dois líderes do partido Panteras Negras são mortos em um ataque da madrugada por policiais atuando a partir de informações fornecidas por um informante do FBI. Na esteira do apelo do presidente Nixon por "lei e ordem", a retomada dos aprisionamentos levou ao limite as condições já precárias da prisão estadual de Attica (estado de Nova Iorque). O motim de cinco dias, que chamou a atenção do público para estas condições, deixou 43 homens mortos: quatro mortos por detentos, 39 pela polícia.

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Ebook currently available for free

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"Would some communities be safer without police? That's the question at the heart of Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?, a collection of essays and reportage penned by some of Truthout's most compelling and enlightened thinkers-including #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Alicia Garza. With heartbreaking, glass-sharp prose, the book catalogs the abuse and destruction of black, native, and trans bodies. And then, most importantly, it offers real-world solutions."
-Chicago Review of Books

"A must-read for anyone seeking to understand American culture in the present day."
-Xica Nation

" Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is an urgently necessary book, one that deepens and complicates thinking around police violence without waiting for a fresh on-camera brutality to restart the national conversation."

"This brilliant collection of essays, written by activists, journalists, community organizers and survivors of state violence, urgently confronts the criminalization, police violence and anti-Black racism that is plaguing urban communities. It is one of the most important books to emerge about these critical issues: passionately written with a keen eye towards building a world free of the cruelty and violence of the carceral state."
-Beth Richie, author of Arrested Justice: Black Women, Violence, and America's Prison Nation

" Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is a powerful collection of essays by organizers, legal activists and progressive journalists that take us beyond the 'few bad apples' theory of police violence, insisting that we interrogate the essential role and purpose of police and policing in our society. These writers have highlighted some of the critical questions that the anti-state violence movement is wrestling with."
-Barbara Ransby, author of Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision

"This timely and essential set of essays written by activists, organizers and journalists offers a window into our particular historical moment centered on an ongoing struggle against state violence. As a long-time organizer immersed in the current Movement for Black Lives, I read the contributions hoping to learn and to be inspired. I found the essays to be informative, illuminating and challenging. The book covers topics ranging from police torture and the fight for accountability to how we might best engage in transformative organizing that could lead to a word without police. I cannot recommend this anthology any more highly. It's an indispensable primer for anyone who wants to understand the current rebellions and uprisings against police impunity."
-Mariame Kaba, founder and director of Project NIA

" Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is an extraordinary collection of writings by activists living and working at the epicenter of police violence and the anti-Blackness and structural racism so foundational to U.S. systems of policing. Simultaneously enraging, invigorating, radically imaginative, practical, and inspiring, this essential book relocates justice in accountable social, economic, and cultural relationships, pointing the way toward foundational transformation rather than cosmetic reform."
-Kay Whitlock, co-author of Considering Hate and Queer (In)Justice

"America is at war, and the violence that propels that war is largely directed at people of color, especially Black youth. One instance of such a war is evident in the violence by the police against Black communities, the criminalization of everyday behavior, the assaults on Black bodies, and the ever growing incarceration state. Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? addresses this violence in a way no other book has done in the last forty years. It reveals the underlying causes, economic and ideological, that drive such violence so as to provide a comprehensive understanding of its roots, its multiple layers, history, and different forms while at the same time it offers a discourse of critical engagement and transformation in order to address it. Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? is an invaluable resource for asking questions about the emergence of racist violence and state terrorism as a defining principle of everyday life and how they can be addressed. Everyone who cares about justice and democracy and a future in which they mutually inform each other should read this book."
-Henry Giroux, author of Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle

"We know the names: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Freddie Gray, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Rekia Boyd, Laquan McDonald. And we've seen the uprisings: L.A., Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago. Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect? goes behind the headlines to ask the deeper questions: Do the police make communities (particularly, communities where Black and Brown people live) safer? Who do community residents fear? Are there ways to address those fears without the police and carceral state? What would we have to create in order to do this? What steps must we take to get there? Each of the essays examines these inter-related questions in depth. Read together, they provide an extremely thorough, and timely, examination of the issues underlying these recent events, forcing us to rethink the very idea of justice in this country."
-Alan Mills, Uptown People's Law Center

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"Would some communities be safer without police? That's the question at the heart of Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?, a collection of essays and reportage penned by some of Truthout's most compelling and enlightened thinkers-including #BlackLivesMatter co-founder Alicia Garza.

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Episode 21: Police Accountability

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Josie Duffy and co-host Darnell Moore discuss police accountability and explain why it's so hard for the criminal justice system to hold police accountable.

As civilians, how do we hold the police responsible for wrongdoing? On the first episode of Season 3, Josie Duffy and co-host Darnell Moore discuss different avenues of police accountability and explain why it's so hard for the criminal justice system to hold police accountable. They are joined by Alicia Garza, an activist, writer, and organizer, who currently serves as principal at Black Futures Lab. Alicia is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter and has been a leader in the fight against police brutality and discriminatory policing, particularly in black communities.

Alicia Garza's Book recommendation: Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi.
Additional resources:
You can find Darnell's book, No Ashes in the Fire, .

To learn more about Black Futures Lab, click .

Make sure to check out the Plain View Project to see more of the discriminatory posts published by law enforcement that we mentioned on the show.

More on the story of Laquan McDonald can be found . Jamie Kalven was the first journalist to bring attention to McDonald's autopsy report, and Brandon Smith, was the journalist who fought diligently for the footage to be released. Check out Kalven's twitter account and Smith's .

Here is the on Ferguson, Missouri, from 2015.

Our email is justiceinamerica@theappeal.org
Transcript
Alicia Garza: Anytime you try to have a conversation about police accountability, anytime you try to have a conversation about what needs to change with policing, you automatically run into the culture conversation. And the culture conversation is actually part of what allows policing to be wholly unaccountable because we have been indoctrinated with a lot of messages that police essentially should be able to function above the law because they are making the greatest sacrifices. And that is something that I think is a huge impediment and barrier to any possibility of changing how policing functions in this country.

Darnell Moore: And I am Darnell Moore.

Josie: And this is Justice in America. Each show we discuss a topic in the American criminal justice system and we try to explain what it is and how it works. Thank you everyone for joining us for the first episode of our third season.

Darnell: You can find us on Twitter @Justice_Podcast. We're also on Facebook, like our Facebook page, Justice in America, and subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcast. We'd love to hear from you.

Josie: So if you're just joining us for the first time, I'm Josie Duffy Rice. I'm president of The Appeal, a news outlet that produces original journalism about the criminal justice system. You can find us at theappeal.org. If you are a long time listener, you may have noticed that Darnell, our co-host today is not Clint Smith who co-hosted Justice in America for the past two seasons. Clint, so sadly will not be joining us this season. He is writing like nineteen books. He has a million hours in his day, but not infinite. But we are really, really excited to have some incredible voices joining me as co-hosts throughout the season. So you've met Darnell Moore, an unbelievable author, of No Ashes in the Fire a critically acclaimed memoir of growing up black and queer in New Jersey. Who's done incredible work in the criminal justice space. We're going to have three other guests co-hosts, join us throughout the season. To introduce you to each of them we recorded some fun, pretty short episodes where I asked them ten questions about themselves and their work. There's one for each of the four guests hosts, and even one for me, so please make sure to check them out either on Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts or on theappeal.org. And we want to thank all our listeners who wrote in with topic ideas. We really appreciate your input and we considered your ideas when planning this season and future episodes. We got so much great feedback, so thank you so much.

Darnell: We've opened the show with a clip from our guest, Alicia Garza. Alicia is an American civil rights activist, editorial writer from Oakland, California. She also happens to be a good friend and sister of mine. She organizes around issues of health, student services and rights, domestic workers' rights and in police brutality, anti-racism, violence against trans and gender-nonconforming people of color, and she's just an all-around dope sis from the Bay.

2:55 Josie: Alicia really is just so incredible. We're so excited to have her on today and she's going to be talking to us about our topic of the day, which is police accountability. In particular, why it's so difficult to hold police accountable. But first, we're going to do our word of the day and today's word is restitution. I want to shout out Sara at the Justice Collaborative for the idea because this is a really great one.

Darnell: When we think of punishment in criminal cases, we generally imagine a prison sentence or being put on probation, but often people convicted of crimes will also be required to pay the victim money, which is referred to as restitution. Basically, the implication is that this is how to make whole the people who have been harmed.

Josie: And restitution is not on its face an unreasonable concept, right? If someone steals $1,000 from you and is prosecuted, it makes sense that part of their punishment would be giving you your $1,000 back, right? But restitution isn't just used in cases where there is sort of an immediate monetary loss. It's used in other cases where the courts are sort of deciding exactly how much money a victim is owed. And the main problem with this is that our criminal justice system really only sees the idea of restitution in monetary terms. It really fails to take into account what a person victimized by a crime may actually need in order to quote "be made whole."

Darnell: Evidence shows that while some people want money, others want an apology or therapy or the ability to talk to the person who harmed them. Sometimes, for many, accountability doesn't look like punishment. It looks like justice coming to us in other ways, so some just want the ability to be heard either by the person who harmed them are their loved ones. Restitution looks different for different people, but the system really only has one approach to so-called restitution.

Josie: Exactly. This underscores something we've talked about a lot on here. The criminal justice system is phenomenal at punishing people, right?

Josie: They're great. A-plus on over-punishment. But it's not great at actually addressing harm.

Darnell: Right. Again, paying money to a harmed party is not the problem, at least generally. Right?

Darnell: The issue is with the term restitution and how narrowly it is defined. Police and prosecutors use it, so implied that money solves more than it does and we know that money just does not solve a lot of things. Ultimately, they use a narrow definition because their ultimate goal is not actually restitution. It's punishment. It's more important for our system to inflict punishment than address harm than actually create space for transformative justice.

Josie: Right. I really like what you said about how for some people, accountability doesn't look like punishment. This narrow definition is really indicative of a much bigger concern about the ways in which our system limits our imagination, right? It just projects definitions onto both the offender and the harmed party instead of responding to the actual needs that exist. For some monetary payments may be welcome, for others monetary payments may be good, but not enough and for others monetary payments may feel like their experience has been cheapened.

Darnell: For sure. Restitution isn't always just one thing, or at least we shouldn't think about it that way. It isn't the same thing for all people. The idea that money alone makes victims whole is not reflective of the many ways in which people navigate harm. I mean, and I think we also need to sort of expand our imagination, you know?

Darnell: To respond to the real ways that people need justice to be enacted.

Josie: Completely. Completely agree. At the end of last season, we had two episodes where we talked about prison abolition, restorative justice and transformative justice.

Here's a clip from Mariame Kaba in which she talks about harm and restitution.

Mariame Kaba: people who are practitioners of restorative justice see restorative justice as a philosophy and ideology, a framework that is much broader than the criminal punishment system. It is about values around how we treat each other in the world. And it's about an acknowledgment that because we're human beings, we hurt each other. We cause harm. And what restorative justice proposes is to ask a series of questions. Mostly the three that are kind of advanced by Howard Zehr, who is the person who about 40 years ago popularized the concept of restorative justice in the United States. He talks about since we want to address the violation in the relationships that were broken as a result of violence and harm, that you want to ask a question about who was hurt, that that is important to ask, that you want to ask then what are the obligations? What are the needs that emerge from that hurt? And then you want to ask the question of whose job is it to actually address the harm? And so because of that, those questions of what happened, which in the current adversarial system are incidental really, you know, it's who did this thing, what rules were broken? How are we going to actually punish the people who broke the rules? And then whose role is it to do that? It's the state's. In restorative justice it's: what happened? Talk about what happened, share what happened, discuss in a, you know, kind of relational sense what happened. And then it's what are your needs? Would do you need as a result of this? Because harms engender needs that must be met, right? So it asks you to really think that through. And then it says, you know, how do we repair this harm and who needs to be at the table for that to happen.

Darnell: Just something to think about the next time you hear the term restitution. Okay. Now we're on to our topic of the day, which is policing.

8:53 Josie: Today we're talking about law enforcement and police oversight. We haven't actually focused many of our episodes here on Justice in America on policing specifically, although we always talk about the police cause they are a major part of every element of the criminal justice system. But there are a few reasons that we haven't sort of centered anything around policing thus far. And one of those is that rightfully there's a fair amount of focus on policing, especially the past few years. And we kind of thought our value is generally in paying attention to other issues. But the other reason really has to do with the sheer number of things that there are to talk about when it comes to policing, right? There's just no way to cover all of policing in one episode.

Darnell: No way at all. But today we're focusing on one aspect of law enforcement specifically. How is law enforcement held accountable? What systems, policies and people are responsible for that and what can the people do? When you hear that question, you may think about some of the stories that have made headlines, especially over the last several years. Like holding police accountable for killing unarmed kids like Laquan McDonald who was shot in the back seventeen times; or twelve-year-old Tamir Rice who was killed playing in a park; Atatiana Jefferson who was shot in her home as she played video games with her nephew; or Philando Castille who was killed as his girlfriend's four-year-old daughter sat in the back seat; or Eric Garner who was killed after yelling "I can't breathe"; or Mike Brown whose body had been left on the street for hours.

Josie: Yeah, I mean all of these, just hearing them said all in a row, right? And this is just the tip of the iceberg and it is of course the case that police accountability means in part the need to hold individual officers responsible when they do something like murder a civilian for no reason. We're going to talk about why that's so difficult today, but when we say police accountability, we mean something even broader than that. You may have heard the Latin phrase - back when I thought I was going to get a tattoo one day I wanted to get this tattoo - the Latin phrase Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? And loosely translated it means who is watching the watcher? In other words, how do we hold accountable the people who are supposed to be holding us accountable? And I think that's kind of the big question when it comes to police in America today.

Darnell: So, a little background before we get into these questions. First, the basics about how law enforcement is structured in America. There are many different kinds of police working in many different jurisdictions. The best way to imagine a spectrum of policing is to think of policing across two axis.

Josie: So the first axis deals with what the police do. In other words, are they just like general law enforcement, you know, your everyday patrol officer or are they specialist police where they might be part of a special jurisdiction? These officers may have a particular skill, like they might be officers in the state bureau of investigation or they may cover a specific jurisdiction, like they may only be officers in parks or public schools or tribal land or college campuses, etcetera.

Darnell: So that's one axis. The what they do axis. The other axis determines where they do it. Again, there are three main levels here. The federal level, the state level and the local level. Federal law enforcement is kind of tricky. The Constitution gives the federal government power to make law of course, but does not explicitly grant the feds much power to enforce the law. There are federal law enforcement agencies including the FBI, the DEA, ICE and others. So it's not like the federal government has no enforcement power, but it's also not like the feds are like regular cops. They aren't patrolling neighborhoods or doing house calls.

Josie: Right. Especially if you're just Joe Schmo who has nothing to do with the DEA or ICE or ATF. Certainly for some people, especially people who have complicated immigration status - right? - ICE is easily the scariest and most powerful law enforcement agency out there perhaps. But as a general rule, the federal law enforcement functions differently. It tends to be specialized, not general, and it's limited by the department or agency. ICE, for example, deals only with immigration issues like we said, the DEA deals only with drug crimes, ATF agents deal primarily with crimes related to firearms. Plus, federal law enforcement only has the power to enforce federal laws. No state laws at all can be enforced by federal law enforcement.

Darnell: State police often exist to enforce the law where local law enforcement can't. The best and primary example of state police would be the highway patrol, which enforces traffic laws on the interstate. In some states, the state police only have the power to enforce traffic laws. In other states, they have more power and are more like what we imagine when we think about cops. But the bottom line is the state police exist to fill in the places local police don't cover or supplement the work local police are doing.

Josie: Right. So that's federal law enforcement and state law enforcement. And then lastly, and most importantly, there's local law enforcement. So that's your local municipal police department or county sheriff. There are some differences between police and sheriffs. Police exist again in municipalities, which tend to be smaller. County sheriffs tend to cover obviously the whole county, which tends to be a much bigger area. Sheriffs are also elected where police chiefs are appointed. But for now the main thing to know is that local policing is the most ubiquitous and the most powerful level of policing that exists.

Darnell: So here's a question. How many different police departments/law enforcement agencies do you think there are in America total? Federal, state, local, specialist, general, all of it. How many? The answer is almost 18,000. 18,000 different law enforcement bodies and no two operate exactly the same. And here's something wild. All federal, state law enforcement combined with all the specialized apartments account for only about 2,500 of that 18,000. The other 15,400 are local police and sheriff departments. There are three times as many local police in America than there are federal and state law enforcement agents combined.

Josie: Right. So again, we just want to emphasize that local police are the ones with the power here, right? The power and numbers. The power and actual power, they have the most power in terms of enforcing the law, and they're the ones that you see on your street corner that are responsible for so much of the harm we see that comes out of policing, right?

15:35 Josie: So we hope you have a clear map in your head. Now, let's get into the real stuff. The perception of the police is so dictated I think, for most people, by their own experience with the police or the experience they saw their loved ones have with the police. For a lot of people, the police represent public safety, they represent protection. But that's not true for a significant portion of this country.

Darnell: Not at all. I mean, I grew up in Camden, New Jersey in the eighties and it was a period, not just in the eighties, but in a city where a lot of the residents, a majority of whom are black and Latinx, were policed by a law enforcement body that did not represent or didn't look like the community. So there had been long standing issues between community members and police. One, many of them didn't live in a neighborhood, so there was no trust. And secondly, there was a long history of law enforcement abuse. We had, like many cities, particularly post-industrial, predominantly black cities across the country, we had, people rioted because of police violence, some of which deadened, some of the citizens there. So you have to imagine that growing up in that city we didn't have a trusting relationship with police. And then being black in America.

Darnell: Being black in the world. Like, you know, your relationship to law enforcement of any type is tinged because of the racism that was inherent in the practices.

Josie: So I thought your point about police not looking like the community is a really important one. A study a couple of years ago found that 95 percent of sheriffs in America are male and 99 percent of sheriffs in America are white.

Josie: It's a remarkably, remarkably high number. And it really speaks to the point that you made about kind of the disconnect between communities and the people policing them. So in theory, how do we keep police accountable? Right? And we'll talk a little bit about theory and practice today, but this is sort of the first question. What would be the first way we'd expect police officers to be held accountable?

Darnell: Well, in theory, a police department or sheriff's office should be first to hold the officers accountable. I mean, to some extent that's what a workplace is supposed to do. No?

Josie: Right. Like if I plagiarize a story or we make up facts or are we harass a colleague or someone we're interviewing, we get fired. I mean, that seems like how it should be. Right?

Darnell: But we know this often doesn't happen. And then 13 years between the time Jason Van Dyke became a cop and the moment that he shot Laquan McDonald, an unarmed black kid in the back 17 times, he had already had 25 complaints filed against him by both civilians and other officers. Most of them were excessive force.

Josie: Right. I mean that's an enormous number of complaints: 25. And yet he was never disciplined. He was never punished. He kept his job after he shot Laquan McDonald. Right? As city officials, supposedly in the midst of a quote unquote "investigation" - that didn't actually seem to be happening - refused to impart any sanctions. They avoided releasing the footage of Laquan MacDonald's death. I mean they basically protected him.

Darnell: Wow. It's so interesting that so often when you hear these types of cases, like my response is always one of just like exasperations.

Darnell: Because it's the same story over and over again.

Josie: It really also makes you think about what we don't know. Right? A very, very dedicated journalist managed to get his hands on the Laquan McDonald footage. But it's very possible we would have never heard about it otherwise. And there are a million things right now that we're not hearing about, that we don't know are happening because they're being protected by the people who are supposed to keep them accountable.

19:16 Darnell: Indeed, recently, an online database called The Plain View Project made public 5,000 sexist, racist and Islamophobic Facebook posts written by cops. Here's a clip from CBS News highlighting that story.

Reporter: The people at this rally outside the Philadelphia Police headquarters weren't surprised by what they read in the racist social media rants.

Man #2: We live here in this city-

Reporter: But Solomon Jones, one of the protest organizers says the brazen public display took it to a different level.

Solomon Jones: It's a turning point because they felt the license to engage in hate in a public way. And what that says to me is that there is a culture that allows that to happen.

Reporter: The Facebook posts in question contained discriminatory opinions. "If our country was all caucasian the homicide rate would drop 70%." "Perhaps we should be very suspicious of all Muslims in this country" said another. Or encourage violence "It's a good day for a chokehold." They were collected by The Plain View Project, a group of lawyers and activists who over two years painstakingly reviewed the Facebook pages of 3,500 current and former police officers in eight departments: Dallas and Denison, Texas, Lake County, Florida, St. Louis, Twin Falls, Idaho, Phoenix, York, Pennsylvania and Philadelphia.

Darnell: If you go to the database at playviewproject.org you can see which officers still have jobs. Spoiler alert, it's a lot.

Josie: Yeah, it's a ton of them.

Darnell: While some of those officers were fired, most of them were not. Many were not even reassigned.

Josie: And this isn't uncommon, right? Misconduct often goes unaddressed or at most results in paid leave or desk duty, and recent studies show that when bad behavior goes unpunished, other officers are more likely to commit misconduct in the future. In other words, one bad apple actually does spoil the bunch.

Darnell: But, even if the police or the sheriff won't hold their officers accountable, there are other possible ways to ensure consequences from misconduct. For example, if the local prosecutor has probable cause to believe the officer's guilty of a crime, they could bring criminal charges. But traditionally local prosecutors have often been less than willing or even in some cases sabotaged their own case to ensure the officer doesn't have to actually face consequences.

Josie: Right. And it's not just charging the officer even, right? You see prosecutors all the time who know that a certain police officer has lied on the stand before. They know a police officer has been accused of coercing confessions out of people or violating someone's due process rights and they'll still present them as like a trustworthy witness to the jury. It's pretty remarkable how willing a lot of prosecutors, not all, but a lot of prosecutors are to let police officers get away with stuff that they would never actually let anyone charged with a crime get away with. And in some ways the calculus makes sense, like in a really kind of dark and cynical way. Prosecutors need the police, they need them on their side, they arrest people, they investigate cases for the prosecutor's office, they testify on the stand. If you prosecute a police officer for murder or for police brutality, you are jeopardizing a really important relationship. And you can see how there's this incentive, right? To avoid holding police accountable.

Darnell: So what other ways could police be held accountable? Well, laws can be enacted and ratified that could be used to hold them accountable. Like the state legislature could pass a law that raises the standard of acceptable officer conduct. In August 2019, California did this very thing: passed a law that says law enforcement can use deadly force only when necessary. In most states, though, the standard is much lower. Deadly force is justified as long as the officer feared for his life. And we know that that fear, this justification of fear can be used in a lot of different ways to excuse police officers. This low standard is part of the reason so many officers have been acquitted. All it takes is you saying you were scared for your life for the death of an unarmed innocent person to be acceptable.

Josie: And there was no interrogation from the system about why someone feared for their life. If seeing a black male consumes you with so much fear that you feel justified in murdering him, that's racism.

Josie: And we don't talk about the mere fact that even being so fearful, I always think about that video of Walter Scott running away from a police officer in South Carolina and getting shot in the back. If you're scared of a man running away from you just because he's black, that's a problem. So quickly, two other potential forms of accountability that are worth mentioning and also why they often fail to actually hold police accountable. First, in theory, a civilian can file a Section 1983 claim and this is a super complex area of law, but the gist is this, if you file a Section 1983 claim, it means that you're filing a federal claim against an individual, state or local actor who you're accusing of violating your civil rights. These claims usually arise when a person acting quote "under color of" state or local law has deprived a civilian of their rights, their rights that they have under the US Constitution or under federal law. It's a civil claim, it's not a criminal one. So if you're subject to police brutality that rises to the very high standard that's required to even win one of these claims, you may receive monetary damages, but there are not going to be any criminal consequences for the officer.

Darnell: Unfortunately though these claims are significantly limited because of another legal principle, qualified immunity. Qualified immunity protects government employees from being sued or held responsible even if they violated a person's civil rights. And while it is supposedly only in cases where the government employee made a reasonable but mistaken judgment, it has repeatedly protected police officers in very extreme cases.

Josie: Yeah. Cases that you wouldn't think are reasonable. Qualified immunity has just really made it difficult to hold people responsible and to hold police officers responsible for violence. I think it's also worth mentioning that like because of qualified immunity, when someone wins a major settlement, who ends up paying for that settlement? The local government, right? Like the local city, the local county. And so that's really us. That's taxpayers, right? Like the local police officer beat someone, torture someone, kill someone, and it's not just that they've inflicted this brutality. It's not like the rest of us are paying out the millions of dollars to the victim of this crime and they're not even getting fired. They don't even lose their job for that. If I cost my job a couple million dollars a year, I promise you I would be fired.

Darnell: Totally and you'd be paying that money back.

Darnell: You would be paying the money back.

Josie: Exactly, exactly, and that's just not the case here.

Darnell: There's another accountability tool we want to mention: consent decrees. These are agreements between an entire police department and the Department of Justice that allows the DoJ to thoroughly investigate and assess issues in the department.

Josie: Yeah. You know, the consent decrees are particularly notable because they address the whole department and issues that are happening across an entire police department. For example, after Mike Brown was killed, DoJ entered into a consent decree with Ferguson and that's at least going a little bit further than just holding the quote unquote "one bad apple" - as they always say - officer accountable. That might be important too, but we're not going to change anything unless we actually look deeper than that. They can't do everything. But under Obama's administration, they did have an impact in places like Ferguson and at the very least, they allow sort of the harmful practices of these departments to come to light publicly.

Darnell: But the use of consent decrees is dependent on who runs the justice department. Obama's DoJ entered into consent decrees with a number of police departments and even one prosecutor's office. But Trump's DoJ immediately scaled them back. Jeff Sessions felt that they were "bad for morale." Those were his words. And of course all of this should really underscore just how difficult it is to hold police accountable through the more traditional channels. A main reason for that is a culture of policing.

Josie: This is a really important point when we talk about holding the police accountable, right? Like we want the right system or the right policy. And I get that, and I think that's important. But the reality is that like we live in a country that is deeply, deeply reverent of law enforcement and law enforcement holds a lot of sway over elected officials. They like have a lot of power. It's really hard to keep the powerful in check.

Darnell: Oh, it's not only a, it's a, it's a culture like that's a militarized culture. It's a culture that favors not only a culture policing, but very sort of militarist, masculinist approaches to managing. That's the way we do our business. It's in so many ways and it's, you know, we are a culture that only ever thinks about managing conflict through means of like, I mean dare say, not just war, but by adding additional conflict to the fire. Right? So it's embedded in our culture all around.

Josie: Right. And I think it's also worth mentioning, part of the reason policing is so harmful in America is, well there's a historical reason, right? But there's also this other thing which is we ask police to do a lot. We ask them to deal with mental health issues. We ask them to solve disputes that they do not have the training or skills to actually address. And we kind of set everybody up I think for failure in some ways.

Darnell: And not only are police doing things that are not necessarily their jobs, I also think that we rely on police to do what so many of us could otherwise be doing ourselves in our communities.

Darnell: I think the point though that we are trying to manage the everyday affairs of human relations and the conflict that comes along with that by means of punishment, you know, I often say like I had to call the police as a young person to get them to come over my house when my father was abusing my mom and what I often say in that example is it wasn't necessarily that I'd needed him to be in jail. I wanted the abuse to stop.

Darnell: Now I probably, if I had another option, say a safe number that I could have called that could have rallied people in the community to come together, that every time I call this number, you know they're coming over to make sure that my mother is safe, to get my father out of the house, to provide him whatever supports he needed to work on his issues. That would have been a better solution. Right? Inevitably what I wanted was safety for my mom. I didn't necessarily need the jail cells to be bolstered up by another black man being in them. And often, I should say too, when we called the police, it was many times where their presence added another layer of heightened aggression, antagonism. The energy that came along with them trying to bring safety was never really, it didn't make us feel safe at all.

Josie: Right. I think that's such an important point and I also think it's worth pointing out that like in this kind of era where police feel targeted and criticized, the approach that in general law enforcement has taken, has been a really antagonistic one, I think, to your point. I think about how rather than making it easier to hold the police accountable over the past five years, six years, seven years, we've made it harder to criticize the police, right? Like they've passed laws in states, Blue Lives Matter laws that are functionally hate crime laws. Hate crime laws have traditionally been four characteristics that people have, immutable characteristics that people have, things they can't change, their race, their gender, things that have been traditionally discriminated against for. And it's remarkable to me and terrifying that in states across the country, the government is basically saying you are in extra trouble if whatever you do involves law enforcement. It's terrifying and it's really just a sign that we do not live in a world that wants to hold police accountable. We just don't.

Darnell: To discuss this some more, we'll be joined by Alicia Garza, an American civil rights activist, an editorial writer from Oakland, California and Alicia will be with us in just a moment. Stay tuned.

31:50 Josie: Alicia, thank you so much for joining us on Justice in America. We're so happy to have you.

Alicia Garza: Thanks for having me.

Darnell: So Alicia, there is so much to be said about you and who you are, your work, it encompasses so much. But in your own words, describe yourself. Tell us who you are.

Alicia Garza: Okay. Big profound question. I wear a lot of hats, but all of those hats are built for the work that I'm mostly passionate about, which is making black communities powerful in every aspect of our lives. So I have done that previously through my work with the Black Lives Matter global network. I work with the National Domestic Workers Alliance as the strategy and partnerships director and a lot of what I work on there is figuring out how to build powerful movements that benefit black communities. And I started an organization in 2018 called the Black Futures Lab and the Black to the Future Action Fund. And our work is focused on making black people powerful in politics.

Darnell: Dope. And give us some context. Talk about where you're from, who your people are, who do you name as your people, a sort of sense of your larger world and how it impacts you and shapes your work in the world.

Alicia Garza: I'm born and raised in the Bay Area and that matters to me. I'm a Bay Area girl through and through.

Darnell: You totally are.

Alicia Garza: I rep the Bay super hard and I am somebody who tries to get a deep belly laugh in at least once a week. It is my self care. And my people honestly are incredibly cosmopolitan. So again, being born and raised here in the Bay, I've had the pleasure and the blessing of having been mentored and nurtured and knocked upside the head by some of our greats. And we also have the benefit here of being a site of very powerful social movements. And so that very much shapes me and very much I consider movement people to be my people. And by movement people, I mean feminist writers and poets and activists like Linda Burnham. I mean people like Angela Davis who lives here in Oakland and once a member of the Black Panther Party for self defense and now as a leading kind of thinker theoretician and organizer around abolition. My people are the people who are trying to make this world a better place and trying to figure out what their lane is and how to get in it and do it really well. And my people are folk who believe that we have to work hard, but we also have to play hard because nobody wants to join your movement if it's hella boring and stuffy all the time. So that's me.

Josie: I love that. Alicia, so we've been talking today about policing and really what it means to keep the police accountable. This I think is one of the many ways that you've been an activist and one of many issues that you've worked on and you are one of the black women who started the Black Lives Matter movement, really credited with naming it, with inspiring it in the wake of Trayvon Martin's death and the acquittal of George Zimmerman in 2013. And I thought George Zimmerman was actually an interesting place for us to talk substantively about the police because he wasn't a police officer, right? He was like just another civilian, but he so believed and so embodied this culture of policing, which I think when we talk about the police, we talk a lot about policy. We talk a lot about like body cameras and this and that and like what we can do, but I don't think that very often traditional media at least gets to the core of this, which is the culture of policing is so pervasive in America and has caused so much harm in black communities in particular. Can you talk a little bit about the culture of policing and how you see it? What you think it means for the larger movement towards accountability and how it's affected your work?

Alicia Garza: Yeah. It's interesting that you say that policing is not just about policy, it's also very much about culture. And I think just to draw that out a little bit, when we talk about the culture of policing, I think we have to be able to talk about the culture of punishment and surveillance and control. One, America has done a very good job of infusing the culture of policing into our everyday lives through popular culture. So one of the shows I grew up on that I think I may have seen every single episode of is Law and Order SVU . And it's really fascinating, right? Because the show has a very similar structure. There is a bad guy that's committing crimes and then there's these two detectives that sometimes skirt the law in order to uphold the law. And in the end they always win. Right? And so it's really interesting that for me, when I think about the culture of policing, I think about the culture of punishment, the culture of how we define what is criminal or what is a crime? I think about the ways in which policing happens, which is now kind of in the hands of everyday citizens. And that's largely about surveillance. So I have a Ring camera on my home, a Ring doorbell or whatever. And it's really fascinating because as part of that you get subscribed automatically to what they call a community, right? Of people who are looking out for each other. But a lot of what that community does is it surveils people in their own community. I get notifications about packages being stolen or a suspicious person who tends to almost always be black in neighborhoods that are historically black but are rapidly gentrifying. And so when we think about who is suspicious, there's a culture there that has actually been placed into the hands of civilians, which is very much about learning to see poor people and black and brown people as potential criminals. Right? And when I think about the culture of policing, I also think very much about the insularity of it all. So with Black Lives Matter, one of the major things that would happen and still happens today is that the familiar retorts are either like 'all lives matter' or 'blue lives matter.' And you know, I was talking just recently with a student journalist who asked me, 'what do you say to people who say that blue lives matter?' And I said, well there aren't blue people, right? So policing as a profession that people choose to do, whereas race, it's not a profession and it's not of our choosing, it is automatically assigned to you for the purposes of categorizing you. And in those categories lie power and privilege. So there is very much though a culture in this country when we talk about policing that leaves policing and police untouchable. There are a few professions in this country that are deemed as not being able to be scrutinized. People who have served in the military, people who are members of law enforcement, people who are firefighters. Like there are particular professions in this country that we uphold in such a way where it becomes blasphemous to scrutinize their behaviors, critique their behaviors or push for changed behavior. So I think for me what makes my work hard is that, you know, anytime you try to have a conversation about police accountability, anytime you try to have a conversation about what needs to change with policing, you automatically run into the culture conversation. And the culture conversation is actually part of what allows policing to be wholly accountable because we have been indoctrinated with a lot of messages that police essentially should be able to function above the law because they are making the greatest sacrifices. And that is something that I think is a huge impediment and barrier to any possibility of changing how policing functions in this country.

Darnell: So let's talk a bit about police oversight. And even though it sort of exists as an idea, I'm not sure that we've seen police oversight work in such a way that it actually has made any type of change. Right? First question is a bit about, I want to hear your sort of thoughts on what might police oversight look like and is it a possibility? But then I'm also thinking about, you brought up Angela Davis, you talked about abolition and I want to attach to that how does abolition, if anything, fit into a framework of police oversight or not?

Alicia Garza: So let's, I mean starting with the question about police oversight, I think you're right, there are examples of police oversight that is quote unquote "affective," but I would say by and large it never can go far enough for a lot of reasons. So, okay, so let me just break down some of these models, right? There are models of like civilian oversight boards, some that have teeth, some that don't. By teeth we mean boards that are able to actually recommend discipline for officers who act out of line in the line of duty. And then there are oversight boards that don't have teeth, right? They make recommendations, but there's no there there in terms of anybody being forced or mandated to actually follow those recommendations. I think there are several jurisdictions around the country that are testing different models of police oversight. However, when we have this conversation about abolition, part of, I think what an abolitionist framework would say is that all policing is harmful, right? And so essentially police oversight is overseeing the harm that policing is doing in communities, but that's not eradicating the harm that policing is doing in communities. And I tend to agree with that. I think when we look at the origins of policing, policing is largely geared around, not safety per se. Policing is largely geared around protecting property and people and because we have societal conditions on who is deserving of protection and who is not, and societal provisions around the role or the importance of property in relationship to people, inherently baked into policing are the wrong priorities. If what we care about is actually solving problems, policing is not set up to do that. Policing is essentially set up to quote unquote "prevent" problems from happening or to punish people when problems occur. But it is not at all geared toward changing any of the material, societal, economic, or political mechanisms that create these problems in the first place. And so when we talk about abolition, I think that abolition as a framework and as a series of practices is really important because what it is calling on us to do is not just to imagine a world without policing, I think that that ends up being a very flat way of understanding what abolition is. I think abolition is actually calling us to figure out how to solve problems in ways that don't create further harm. And I can say, as somebody who thinks abolition is a good idea, I have a really hard time practicing it. So in a lot of ways I think it points to how important it is because it forces us to say, okay, well we know all the things that we're fighting against, but if we were going to change it, what would it look like? In this instance when we're talking about police accountability, I'm actually not interested in monitoring how police do their jobs in communities. Like I don't think that's a good use of time or resources. It's a first step, but it certainly is an intermediate step and it's not a long term step. I'm more interested in figuring out how do we make it so that the things that police are charged with - you know, moving homeless people from corner to corner - I'm more interested in figuring out how do we make sure that everybody has a home to go to.

Alicia Garza: I'm less interested in police monitoring activities in schools. I'm much more interested in figuring out how do we make sure that all families have the things that they need so that the problems that police are checking for actually get dealt with.

Alicia Garza: And so at its best, I think the abolition frameworks are calling on us to be the architects of the world that we want to live in. And it's challenging us also to undermine and dismantle all of the ways that we've been taught to think about the role of punishment in creating safety. Also, the way that we've been taught that to be safe as actually not in our own hands and it's not in our own wheel houses. For me, if I'm compelled to call the police for a problem, I have to think about that. I have to think to myself, well, why don't I have the tools to deal with this problem? If it's my neighbor and their music is too loud, why am I calling the police rather than having a relationship with my neighbor where I can call them or knock on their door and say, 'hey, can you turn the music down I have to go to work tomorrow?' If I see somebody breaking into a car on my street, why do I call the police for that? Right? Yeah, okay. I have a broken window, but there's some other problems that need to be attended to. What do we need to do to have those tools to deal with those problems? That's the thing that I'm the most interested in.

46:21 Josie: It's interesting. I went to go hear Mariame Kaba speaking April and she asked a question to a room full of people like, 'okay, what happens if you hear your neighbor beating his spouse?' And it was so hard for people in the room, myself included, to imagine not calling the authorities in that moment and really getting deep down into the question of what does it mean to have a relationship with your neighbors? What does it mean to be able to like intervene in moments of violence or pain without involving police or law enforcement and what are our fears? When there is a relationship and kind of a tapestry of a community that's strong enough, people hold each other accountable in ways that are really important.

Alicia Garza: Yeah. I mean, interestingly I have actually had to deal with that situation and did not call the police because I was worried about the harm that the police would inflict. This was a young couple with a young child that had some issues and things were not going well with them and they were arguing and it was getting escalated and actually we were able to de escalate. But part of what that was about, as you said, was that those were my neighbors for like 13 years. Right? And so we knew each other, we knew each other in, you know, not intimate ways, but in such a way where it mattered that we needed to share space.

Alicia Garza: And so they were hyper aware of that. But the other thing that I think is just really fascinating is that in a lot of communities, and the community I lived in at this time when I was dealing with this incident, it doesn't matter if you call police because they don't come. So. (Chuckles.) It's like in communities across America, people have already been forced to figure out what to do without police services because they don't receive police services. Policing is not equitable in it's distribution. And so there's a lot to tap into there as well about what happens and we're, we're moving into these moments. What happens when we're forced to depend on each other to survive, right? Where it's not like a hippy dippy convenient thing where we depend on each other when we want and we don't when we don't want to, but it's like actually as a matter of survival, nobody's coming for us. Nobody's coming to save us. So then what do we do to save ourselves?

Josie: Right. You know, I think you brought up something interesting just about how hard it can be to avoid the culture of punishment, the culture of law enforcement and how abolition kind of is like a daily practice that we all sometimes fail in terms of our own instincts. On that point, I just wonder about the traditional way that even a lot of people who believe in more police accountability think about police accountability, right? Which is, have we punished the police officer in question? So, you know, a police officer kills a black on armed person or armed person in the case of like Philando Castile or some other stories and, and there's completely legitimate outrage about it. And then the question becomes, are we going to use this screwed up system to punish this person in this screwed up system? Which I obviously understand the instinct and also regularly I'm invested in that also happening, ,to your point. I wonder what you think about the way that even many progressive people think about accountability as is this person going to get prosecuted? Are they going to go to prison? Are they going to serve time? How that as a way of keeping the police accountable is both what are the merits of that, if there are any, and also how is it harmful.

Alicia Garza: This is actually how I met Darnell is through these conversations about what is accountability and what is justice. And the context here is just that after we created the Black Lives Matter hashtag and the social media platforms, Renisha McBride, who was a young woman who was killed in Dearborn, Michigan, again by not police, but a private citizen who for all intents of purposes saw this young girl on his porch in the middle of the night asking for help as a threat so he shot her through his door in the face and killed her. The prosecutor in that case initially refused to press charges and it was people like Dream Hampton, who were like, 'you're not going to sweep this under the rug or allow for this young black woman's death to not be acknowledged.' Right?

Alicia Garza: Ted Wafer was subsequently sentenced. He's never going to get out of prison basically. And lots of people were cheering and saying, 'hey, justice has been served.' And we actually pulled together a whole national conversation to actually have the discussion about what was justice? And it is really tricky. I think that we hold on to punishment in ways that are not healthy for us. And when I think about social movements that have struggled, even though they've had very beautiful components and pieces to them, one of the major things beyond corruption that derails successful social movements is the use of punishment and retribution. And when power changes hands, there is a question on the table about how is power being transformed rather than how are we not just replacing one group of people with another group of people, but keeping the same harmful dynamics in place? Now with that being said, of course when bad things happen, we do, we want some recourse for bad things happening, but it doesn't equal justice. It equals something bad happened to me, so something bad has to happen to you. And that's where we are. That is a part of that culture of policing that we were talking about earlier. It is inherent in our criminal system that the way that we address harm is to make sure that we set up conditions to where harm is equal as opposed to dealing with the harm itself. Allowing for there to be a process by which people can acknowledge the harm that's been done and get what they need to move through the trauma of what harm does to us and our families and the people we love. With that being said, is it justice that a man who made a really bad decision in a split second, is it justice that he is going to spend the rest of his life in prison? I don't know that I would call that justice. I would say that it is, it's another kind of harm. Is it justice that Renisha McBrides family will never see her again? No. And I think from working with families who have lost people to state violence, nobody is going back and forth with these families about, you know, don't push for jail time for somebody who killed your child. Like, nobody's doing that and they shouldn't, but it doesn't mean that we don't have to have those conversations as a movement. And so I have this question on my mind and my heart like when we win - I think about this a lot as a movement builder - when we win, and so winning for me is like disrupting the state apparatus so that it can't function the way that it functions, we are taking power, right? And we are now in a position to determine how we move forward, which means we also have to be thinking about how is it that we are dealing with the people who we have identified as problems? When we start to win and when we take over what becomes different about who we are than what is happening right now? If it's just that there's different people in power, I'm not totally interested in that. I do think it requires us to rethink and reimagine what accountability looks like. And Mariame Kaba talks about this a lot. Accountability is also not punishment. It is a way to address harms that have been done, but it is also a, it's not a one directional process. Harm is collaborative. I think part of what I keep trying to drill down on, and I don't have the answers for this, so this is not a critique of like our movement it's more just reflections on my own self about, yeah, like when I feel harmed, when I am harmed either by somebody's policies, their practices or you know, whatever is happening, how am I engaging in such a way where we're not just replicating the same harm back and forth over and over again? At what point does that cycle get interrupted and what needs to happen for it to be interrupted? In the case of Ted Wafer and Renisha McBride, what needed to happen there to really interrupt that pattern of harm and abuse that they were actually symptomatic of, but not the totality of. What needs to happen, right? In this dynamic between George Zimmerman, who continues to be a perennial fucking idiot and the Martin family, right?

Josie: He really does. Right.

Alicia Garza: What needs to happen in order for there to be an intervention that sets it on a different course? And those are the big questions that I think we need to be grappling with when we're talking about accountability of any sort, whether it be with the police or politicians. And when we talk about abolition and what abolition looks like in real time, what are the interventions that we're making that interrupt the patterns that are killing our people?

Darnell: This is so good. You're almost sorta like, you keep hinting at the questions that we have yet to ask you like you're all up in our heads. Um, but as you're talking, I'm thinking about what some folk have called, like the crisis of imagination. On some occasions I remember having conversations with people and said, you know, in so many ways, so many of us are trying, especially black people, right? Like vulnerable folk within the context of the US and the globe we're spending our time trying to live so that you don't really have time to dream, you know? And I just want to talk a little bit about the importance of expanding our imaginations so that we can dream up new ways of being, new ways of relating. Ruthie Wilson Gilmore talks about abolition not only as an absence of the things that harm us, but it really is about imagining and building of the things that we need in place of the things that harm us. So talk a little bit about the usefulness of imagination. What we need in this moment to dream up new ways of being in a relationship with one another, new ways of thinking about justice beyond what we have and how critical that is, not only for the work, but also as critical to your own work?

Alicia Garza: Oh man. Okay. Yeah. Woo. Big questions. So the crisis of imagination and what are the interventions and practices that we need to make around that? I mean, for me personally, I spend a lot of time thinking about the crisis of imagination as it relates to politics and political systems. I spend a lot of time trying to get in the way of the weird symbolic and really denigrating ways that black people are and are not engaged in the decisions that impact our lives. And I think where the imagination comes in is like every time I have to remind a candidate that a plate of soul food is not an engagement strategy, then I also have to say what is an engagement strategy?

Darnell: I mean who's making that soul food though?

Alicia Garza: And wasting the soul food too, which is killing me. Anyways. Every time I have to have a conversation with a political party about how much they are or are not investing in engagement of black communities, I also have to be able to say what they have to be able to do. And so I feel like my imagination is always being tested because I know how frustrating it is to always run into nos with no path or pattern, right? And I think that our people really do deserve, our people deserve a regular practice of freedom dreaming that helps us get through the bullshit in our day, but also orders our steps towards what we actually care about. And how I personally do it, I can say - I'm just going to, I'm just going to say this and people are going to be mad, but I don't care - there's a lot I love about growing up in the Bay and part of it is this rich political history and rich political practice. And there's been a point for me where I've started to say I'm not sure choirs are helpful, right? For imagination. There have been many times in my own political trajectory where I have felt like I'm being taught what to think but not how to think. And so as a result, it has allowed me to be comfortable playing small because there was a cheering section. And so for me, the way that I cultivate imagination and counter the crisis of imagination is like really listening to and listening for like what am I doing, talking about, projecting, engaging around that is playing small and what am I talking about, communicating, engaging around that is inviting more people to be with me? Even people who aren't saying the same things I'm saying or don't say them the way that I say them. How am I inviting more and more people to be a part of the community that I'm trying to build and how do I get more invitations to the communities that other people are trying to build? That's my job. That's how I see my job. My job is not to find like a small group of people who all think and feel the same about a thing. That's not change to me. And somewhere along the way, I think part of what has helped me continue to cultivate that is just reminding myself and being aware of everything that becomes possible when you can touch more people. Being able to touch more people means that you get a wider view of what's actually happening in the world. Being able to touch more people means that you get new and layered and nuanced perspectives about how to solve a problem and who needs to be considered in the addressing of those issues. Reaching and touching more and more people means that actually when it's time to move, that you actually have a group of people who will roll with you from likely and unlikely corners, which is actually a strategic thing because it helps us get stuff done.

Alicia Garza: So, that for me has become kind of the centerpiece of how I'm engaging in political work right now, which also means that I have to sit with myself in the process of the change from like being super comfortable with a small group of people who all say and do the same thing to being really uncomfortable and sometimes lonely and isolated in a wider ocean where there's lots of different fish, there's lots of things happening in the, in the ecosystem. But I can say that that discomfort is how I know I'm in the right place. I don't think imagination happens when you're like in your tightest groove. Like imagination happens when you really got to figure some stuff out and you feel like, okay, I need to find the ground under my feet, I need to figure out like who's on my side, who's got my back, right? Like imagination comes from there for me personally. So that's my practice around how to cultivate it.

Darnell: I love it. And certainly your imagination has been quite expansive because you've been at the helm of a lot of projects and we want to end by having you just say a bit about the project you're working on, ones that we should be listening out for and how people can get involved.

Alicia Garza: Oh yes. Well, I am involved in many projects right now, but one that I'm super excited about is the Black Futures Lab and the Black to the Future Action Fund. In 2018, we conducted the largest survey of Black America in 154 years. And we got a lot of information about what black people experience in the economy, in our society and our democracy and most importantly, what black people envisioned for our futures. We spent 2019 going back into the communities that we collected data from, releasing the results of the survey and dreaming with folk about what was possible, not just with this data, but in particular with these freedom dreams that black folks were offering us. And so in 2020 we have taken that data and translated it into a black political agenda and are launching a program that we're calling Black to the Ballot. We know that 2020 is a turnout election and we know that black folks relationships to electoral organizing is very complicated.

Alicia Garza: And so we really seek to be a home for black folk who are trying to find their way through a very complicated political terrain, but offering also, what is it that we're fighting for? So when people are telling you and people are going to be telling you all year how important it is for you to vote, how important it is for you to get in lock step with everybody else, the thing that's actually gonna motivate black voters in 2020 is pushing for an agenda that addresses our needs. And so as we do that work to build that agenda, the agenda for a black future, we are also working to expand the black electorate in five states - California, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia and Alabama - by really tapping into black communities that are incredibly active but not electorally. So what does it look like when we build the capacity of black trans folks to actually be able to participate in the electoral process? What does it look like when we really invest in black rural communities or black immigrant communities to participate in the electoral process that they've been locked out of or left behind from? We are very excited to register, mobilize and activate 10,000 new black voters in advance of 2020 as our little contribution to making the change happen that we need to see in this country. Not just in the White House but in state houses and decision making places all over the country. So that's what I'm super passionate about. And if you want to know more about not only what we're up to but how you can get involved, you can visit us at blackfutureslab.org.

Josie: We are both inspired by you daily and really are so honored that you joined us. I wrote down like thirty things you said and I'll be thinking about them for at least the next ten years. So.

Darnell: Yeah she really has a whole page.

Josie: I really have a whole page. So we're so grateful for you joining us and thank you so much.

Alicia Garza: Well, thank you for having me.

66:36 Josie: Thank you so much again to our guest Alicia Garza, just an incredible woman, an incredible conversation. We're so thankful that you joined us. For show notes and to find other resources to read on this issue, please visit TheAppeal.org.

And on that note we're introducing a new element to our podcast this season. We received a number of emails from listeners asking for book recommendations. Mainly who our guests are reading or have read to help inform their perspective. So this season we're offering a bonus episode with our guests talking about books that have influenced them. So make sure to check out our first bonus for Alicia Garza! You can find it wherever you listen to podcasts or on The Appeal.org.

Darnell: And thanks to all of you for listening to Justice in America. I'm Darnell Moore.

Josie: I'm Josie Duffy Rice.

Darnell: You can find us on Twitter @Justice_Podcast, like our Facebook page at Justice in America and subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcast.

Josie: Justice in America is produced by Florence Barrau-Adams. The Production Assistant is Trendel Lightburn. Research Assistant Nawal Arjini. The location recording by Phoebe Gunter. Studio recordings at Real Voice LA. The engineer was Mike DeLay. And at Skyline Studios the engineer was Joe DiStefano. Thank you so much everyone for listening and we'll catch you next time.

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Justice in America Episode 21: Police Accountability

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As civilians, how do we hold the police responsible for wrongdoing? On the first episode of Season 3, Josie Duffy and co-host Darnell Moore discuss different avenues of police accountability and explain why it's so hard for the criminal justice system to hold police accountable.

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Boston Review

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Abolition is not about transforming the police, it is about transforming the nation.

Last year student activists at Harvard Law School covered the official portraits of the school's professors with printouts of police shooting victims' last words: Please don't let me die. Why did you shoot me? You promised me that you wouldn't kill me. I love you. In classrooms, many of our professors excluded victims' voices from debates about criminal justice reform. This action centered them. Afterwards, a classmate asked: "How will we be safe with the police? How will we be safe without them?"

How can we re-center policing as a public good if it never was one?

In " Policing: A Public Good Gone Bad," Tracey Meares calls for a "kind of policing that we all can enjoy." She suggests that the police can be transformed after they have been abolished, and that "disadvantaged communities ought not give up policing any more than they should give up public schools, electricity, or water." The Yale law professor hopes to re-center the police as a public good, change community perception of police encounters, and insist that cops value black life.

Meares's post-abolition transformational call is at best unclear and, at worst, a liberal version of broken windows policing. How can we re-center an entity as a public good if it never was one? How can society transform police departments after they no longer exist? What do we gain by shifting how the community feels about police interactions? What do we truly believe police abolition to be?

First, disadvantaged communities have incomplete access to public goods. Poor people do not have the option of giving up public schools, water, or highways, and the state penalizes them for trying. Privileged groups give up public education by sending their children to private schools or moving to wealthy zip codes. When poor families use a relative's address to send their children to a higher-performing school district, they go to jail. Highways are public goods for suburban residents who work in downtown centers. Yet poor black folk cannot give up the highways that divide and pollute their neighborhoods. Flint residents are still without clean water; 41 percent of them live in poverty. At one point, the state charged residents for overdue water bills. If they do not give up their water, they face sickness and death.

Oppressed people must give up the systems that harm them. Police are not public, nor good. Departments arrest for profit and sell vulnerable people to jails and prisons to fill beds. Cities incentivize and reward police officers for maximizing their ticket writing and traffic stops. On college campuses, cops make drugs disappear; on the streets, cops make alleged dealers disappear. Police officers are prison-industrial complex foot soldiers, and poor people are its targets. Disadvantaged communities should not ask for law enforcement to ensure safety any more than someone should ask for poisoned water to quench thirst.

Abolition requires more than police officers disappearing from the streets. It means decreasing and eliminating the reliance on policing.

Second, a call for police transformation after abolition undermines the purposes of abolition. The call tethers accountability to police review boards, task forces, and pleas to value black lives. Meares is silent on what shall remain of law enforcement to be transformed after it is abolished.

We must expand notions of abolition.

During slavery, abolition required more than just disappearing enslaved people from plantations. Society had to eliminate its reliance on forced and brutal labor (unfortunately, it largely shifted to sharecropping and convict lease labor). The country fought a civil war. Overseers, plantation owners, and slave importers had to become obsolete. Amendments were added to the Constitution. Capital was shifted. The formerly enslaved had to find labor, shelter, and protection. There was a short-lived Reconstruction period with elected black officials, civil rights gains, and Jim Crow losses. Abolition required a complete end to slavery, and an ongoing struggle to end all of its lesser versions.

Today abolition requires more than police officers disappearing from the streets. Last week I watched news footage of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, throwing punches and rocks at crowds of clergy counter-protesters. My professor, Cornel West, and hometown hero, Rev. Traci Blackmon, were among the attacked group. West, Blackmon, and I faced police military tanks, tear gas, rubber bullets, chemical agents, and physical violence in Ferguson, Missouri. Officer Darren Wilson murdered Michael Brown, Jr., just three years ago this month. How can we account for the different police response to the white supremacist attacks in Charlottesville? State inaction in Charlottesville and state militarization in Ferguson demonstrate that for vulnerable groups, police officers can be either perpetrators or bystanders in violent encounters.

'How will we be safe with the police? How will we be safe without them?'

Some argue that a "Ferguson Effect" has led to lax patrolling, intervention, and arrests. You see what happens when police don't do anything? Who is going to keep law and order? Mere police absence, inaction, or non-intervention is not police abolition. Mychael Denzel Smith explains police activity in the Nation this way: "Ninety percent of an officer's time isn't devoted to our safety, but rather to things we may find annoying (or in the case of things like untaxed cigarettes, create a black market for goods that threaten the profits of businesses), inserting the potential for violence where there is cause for none." Law enforcement arbitrarily enforces laws according to demographics and maintains order according to each officer's subjective notion of peace. Transformation will not save it.

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

Finally, Meares suggests that finding a new symbolic language to think about police officers' role in society would initially redeem the institution as a public good. Yet the community's subjective perceptions of policing does little in the face of objective brutality. Meares does not provide data to suggest whether friendly police interactions make cops less likely to assault and kill people. Relying on police benevolence leaves black people vulnerable to the arbitrary spectrum of police violence. If more people cared about cops being nice to them personally, would that have saved Tamir Rice or Aiyana Stanley Jones?

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Abolition is not about transforming the police, it is about transforming the nation. Last year student activists at Harvard Law School covered the official portraits of the school's professors with printouts of police shooting victims' last words: Please don't let me die. Why did you shoot me?

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Article in The Conversation

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This article was updated on June 2, 2020.

But tensions between the police and black communities are nothing new.

There are many precedents to the Ferguson, Missouri protests that ushered in the Black Lives Matter movement. Those protests erupted in 2014 after a police officer shot unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown; the officer was subsequently not indicted.

The precedents include the Los Angeles riots that broke out after the 1992 acquittal of police officers for beating Rodney King. Those riots happened nearly three decades after the 1965 Watts riots, which began with Marquette Frye, an African American, being pulled over for suspected drunk driving and roughed up by the police for resisting arrest.

I'm a criminal justice researcher who often focuses on issues of race, class and crime. Through my research and from teaching a course on diversity in criminal justice, I have come to see how the roots of racism in American policing - first planted centuries ago - have not yet been fully purged.

Slave patrols

There are two historical narratives about the origins of American law enforcement.

The first slave patrols arose in South Carolina in the early 1700s. As University of Georgia social work professor Michael A. Robinson has written, by the time John Adams became the second U.S. president, every state that had not yet abolished slavery had them.

Members of slave patrols could forcefully enter anyone's home, regardless of their race or ethnicity, based on suspicions that they were sheltering people who had escaped bondage.

The more commonly known precursors to modern law enforcement were centralized municipal police departments that began to form in the early 19th century, beginning in Boston and soon cropping up in New York City, Albany, Chicago, Philadelphia and elsewhere.

Police corruption and violence - particularly against vulnerable people - were commonplace during the early 1900s. Additionally, the few African Americans who joined police forces were often assigned to black neighborhoods and faced discrimination on the job. In my opinion, these factors - controlling disorder, lack of adequate police training, lack of nonwhite officers and slave patrol origins - are among the forerunners of modern-day police brutality against African Americans.

Jim Crow laws

Slave patrols formally dissolved after the Civil War ended. But formerly enslaved people saw little relief from racist government policies as they promptly became subject to Black Codes.

For the next three years, these new laws specified how, when and where African Americans could work and how much they would be paid. They also restricted black voting rights, dictated how and where African Americans could travel and limited where they could live.

Reverberating today

For the past five decades, the federal government has forbidden the use of racist regulations at the state and local level. Yet people of color are still more likely to be killed by the police than whites.

The Washington Post tracks the number of Americans killed by the police by race, gender and other characteristics. The newspaper's database indicates that 229 out of 992 of those who died that way in 2018, 23% of the total, were black, even though only about 12% of the country is African American.

Policing's institutional racism of decades and centuries ago still matters because policing culture has not changed as much as it could. For many African Americans, law enforcement represents a legacy of reinforced inequality in the justice system and resistance to advancement - even under pressure from the civil rights movement and its legacy.

In addition, the police disproportionately target black drivers.

When a Stanford University research team analyzed data collected between 2011 and 2017 from nearly 100 million traffic stops to look for evidence of systemic racial profiling, they found that black drivers were more likely to be pulled over and to have their cars searched than white drivers. They also found that the percentage of black drivers being stopped by police dropped after dark when a driver's complexion is harder to see from outside the vehicle.

This persistent disparity in policing is disappointing because of progress in other regards.

There is greater understanding within the police that brutality, particularly lethal force, leads to public mistrust, and police forces are becoming more diverse.

What's more, college students majoring in criminal justice who plan to become future law enforcement officers now frequently take "diversity in criminal justice" courses. This relatively new curriculum is designed to, among other things, make future police professionals more aware of their own biases and those of others. In my view, what these students learn in these classes will make them more attuned to the communities they serve once they enter the workforce.

In addition, law enforcement officers and leaders are being trained to recognize and minimize their own biases in New York City and other places where people of color are disproportionately stopped by the authorities and arrested.

But the persistence of racially biased policing means that unless American policing reckons with its racist roots, it is likely to keep repeating mistakes of the past. This will hinder police from fully protecting and serving the entire public.

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The racist roots of American policing: From slave patrols to traffic stops

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Half a century after the federal government voided Jim Crow laws, the criminal justice system still discriminates against African Americans.

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Please note that this data is being used to advocate for reform. We don't believe reforms work; however this data is useful for quantifying incidents across the US.

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"The PIC Is..." 'zine is designed to be an accessible introduction to the prison-industrial complex for youth and adults. It was created by th... See More

"The PIC Is..." 'zine is designed to be an accessible introduction to the prison-industrial complex for youth and adults. It was created by th... See More

Connecting content to people.

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"The PIC Is..." 'zine is designed to be an accessible introduction to the prison-industrial complex for youth and adults. It was created by the Chicago Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) Teaching Collective and illustrated by Billy Dee.

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Home organization of Mariame Kaba

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What's Happening Now

April 2019 Building Accountable Communities National Gathering

In April 2019, Mariame partnered with Barnard's Center for Research on Women to organize a panel discussion with local activists and change makers about the meaning of accountability.
Watch the video

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What's Happening Now In April 2019, Mariame partnered with Barnard's Center for Research on Women to organize a panel discussion with local activists and change makers about the meaning of accountability. Watch the video

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A Series on What Police Abolition Could Look Like

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A Series on What Police Abolition Could Look Like

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If no credit feels weird to you, my name is Amber Hughson and my IG is @conflicttransformation

About the Abolition these images represent:
Ruth Wilson Gilmore explains "Abolition is about abolishing the conditions under which prisons became the solutions to problems, rather than abolishing the buildings we call prisons;" abolition is the work of building anti-oppressive culture and ways of addressing harm that center care. Abolition as a political practice is grounded in Black liberation; liberation from slavery, Jim Crow, policing, and incarceration. The term abolition as a confrontation with policing and prisons was popularized most notably by former Black Panther Party member and scholar-activist Angela Davis. Later, the work of modern abolition was shaped by the organization Critical Resistance. There are hundreds of organizations shaping this work today, including Survived and Punished, Incarcerated Workers Organizing Committee, Black & Pink, The Red Nation, Southerners on New Ground, BYP100, and of course, Black Lives Matter. In Minneapolis where rebellions continue, central abolitionist organizations are Reclaim the Block and Black Visions Collective.

That's actually pretty hard to imagine.

Interesting, although the part about neighbors trained in "self defense" worries me

I wonder if they'll be easier or harder for people to accept if they realize this unemployment thing isn't going away anytime soon because companies downsized, and having people working towards their communities is probably preferable to having them languish in means-tested precarity as one of the deserving poor.

One function of the police system is making these solutions impossible to imagine.

They mostly read like they were written by idealistic 15 year olds with no real world experience.

Poster 1 - When the crisis intervention team attends and are assaulted by the drunk / coked up youths and 1 hour later are sitting in A&E or alternatively they take both parties home and one goes on to choke on their own vomit / OD / Assault their partner or whatever and the crisis team member is now responsible.

This is all well and good but that ridiculous poster near the bottom seems to be suggesting that if there is a mass shooting we are relying on "good guys with a gun"

This one is so unrealistic it kind of makes the whole thing fall apart.

"A series on what police abolition might look like"
People seem to be skipping over the word might.

pigs: but what if shootybang instead
cops are raised on hate for the poor and minorities, that sounds like a nightmare to them, they enroll to kill people first and foremost

Police system is 60 years behind, the fact that we can hardly imagine these things is telling.

Does not everyone have neighbours trained in self-defence and de-escalation willing to put their lives and safety on the line for no money?

I thought it was common all over the world? /s

At times like these it's probably good to remember that there are a whole lot of other western countries that are a whole lot more progressive than the US and none of them have ever suggested abolishing their police force. There's probably a good reason for that.

Do you also think forum moderation could be abolished if only part of the community received training in conflict deescalation techniques?

the one about neighbors in self defense training is so bad it ruins the rest IMO

"A series on what police abolition might look like"
People seem to be skipping over the word might.

No they're not, they're responding to the might that is presented.

Police system is 60 years behind, the fact that we can hardly imagine these things is telling.

Or its just dismisses how actual human being act as a species and pretends all anyone ever really needs in a wee hug and a chat ?

Written by people who live their life on the internet no doubt.

I think my neighbors already think they are self-defense experts. To me, police can be all these things if they wanted to but it seems most individuals and organizations just take the easy route of beating people up and taking them to jail as a catch-all. Police should be training to de-escalate and use a variety of responses depending on the situation.

Like in a couple of these scenarios you just have city employees on patrol looking for brake lights and people sleeping on park benches? Sounds like the police anyway. The difference would be that you want people who's goal is to not bring you to jail or punish you but to help which I think is what community policing is supposed to be.

I definitely want my armed hick neighbors trained in self-defense, sounds AWESOME.

This one suggestion out of many doesn't work so let's better arm our police officers with rocket launchers just to be on the safe side.

Did Gal Gadot write these?

A lot of that seems to be just replacing police with "crisis intervention team".

Hear me out. What if we made a system where we gave a bunch of racist idiots guns and told them to go around policing? Oh wait, that's already what we do!

These scenarios aren't any more absurd than our current reality.

-I am deleting my posts in this thread becuase on reflection they're not useful or good -

I believe the implication is that there would be programs in place to make sure people are connected with their neighbours and several people in every neighbourhood have appropriate self defence skills for such situations.

It wouldn't just be a case of hoping someone around you knows how to handle shit.

"A series on what police abolition might look like"
People seem to be skipping over the word might.

Yeah, but in cases like this I look more towards how the solution handles the worst case, not the average cases. Given that, if the idea of handling potentially dangerous situations involves "neighbors trained in self defense" aka "good guys with guns" and neighborhood watches, both of which have resulted in a lot of the problems people are protesting for today, that makes me skeptical of the idea overall

No thanks on the neighbor with a gun. We've seen that countless times before....

A few of these aren't realistic at all even with police being abolished

No thanks to some of these. Calling your neighbors trained in self-defense? LOL. But I think mental health professionals and a better understanding of mental illness in general are sorely needed.

It's a bit of a problem. Community self-defense squads are a little bit more involved than "Call up your neighbors and have them use generic techniques to fix the situation" in the places and times where it's been successfully implemented.

In places like Catalonia back in the 30's, the way this worked when they got rid of their own police is that the labor unions would volunteer people from their group to patrol and be on call. But that was based on an anarcho-syndicalist platform where unions represented the fundamental basis of societal organization-- the wartime situation also muddled things, naturally. You'd have to find an alternative rotation within your community if you weren't running something similar. It's not impossible, but it authentically requires, well... actually imagining what comes next. But it's a very concrete sort of imagining, IMO.

Because a lot of confrontations don't need armed fighters geared up with more weapons than soft skills to resolve the issue.

A pro-abolition critique that I have of this poster series is that, IMO, one of the big things that people need to imagine is a separation between criminal investigation and crime response. Because everyone understands that crimes are going to happen and investigations are therefore necessary. That's been the case since before police have been a thing. Getting people to think along those lines is one of the critical hurdles that leaves people wondering at the phrase "crisis intervention team."

You think your neighbors aren't racist? You think the people hired on these 400 different crisis intervention teams wont have some racists? You think the tail light replacement guy can't be racist?

Bunch of semantics that boils down to:

IMAGINE Police...but who do their jobs.

-I am deleting my posts in this thread becuase on reflection they're not useful or good -

This is pretty much it. Many of those could be done by what police should be

As an American, I imagine banning all guns every day.

Also as an American, I agree with you completely.

Systemic racism means cops have an incentive to be racist, attract racists, and enforce laws that disproportionately affect minorities.

Sure anyone can be racist. But in these scenarios the incentive is minimised or even not there.

-I am deleting my posts in this thread becuase on reflection they're not useful or good -

This is the kind of utopic thinking that leads to dystopias. I really don't want people calling their neighbors to deal with people they don't like, thank you very much. What everyone needs is good cops.

You talk about utopic thinking, and then you mention good cops.

Some of these are neat.

Yea pretty much. Until human nature changes, we need police. But we need to completely rethink how police are trained, equipped, who is picked, and the role police unions.

What sucks is that US obsession with guns doesn't help. Civilians armed to the teeth so the police think they need military grade weapons as well. You have wannabe soldiers wanting permission to use their fancy deadly toys. It's a mess, but it can be fixed if leaders stop being afraid of the police.

You mean LIKE THE FUCKING POLICE

some of you love the police state huh

Imagine a well trained and non-militarized police force.

So how does this work with robbers and violent criminals and/or rapists?

Yeah, as a black man living in a mostly Republican state, I wouldn't trust my neighbors like that.

How about keeping police but having actual standards for who can get in the force instead of any racist asshole, and proper training for them to handle these kinds of situations without resorting to drawing their gun?

Basically. People don't get that part of police abolition is balkanizing the fuck out of all the services police render, so that there's not a Universal Violence Machine on call regardless of the problem you're facing.

The armed guy with a truncheon shouldn't be showing up to your mental health emergency. He shouldn't be the one in charge of monitoring your tail lights. Frankly, he shouldn't be the one involved with criminal investigation beyond providing immediate security at a crime scene.

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Imagine - A series on what police abolition might look like

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If no credit feels weird to you, my name is Amber Hughson and my IG is @conflicttransformation About the Abolition these images represent: Ruth Wilson Gilmore explains "Abolition is about abolishing the conditions under which prisons became the solutions to problems, rather than abolishing the...

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by Benji Hart

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The Trump administration has proposed its first federal budget. As expected, it promises to cut back or remove funding for environmental protection, after-school programs and the arts, while dramatically upping spending on the military, law enforcement and national security. Criticizing it for its shortsightedness and implausibility, a popular statistic cited by its opponents is that it costs more to guard Trump Tower in New York-where Trump's wife and son live in lieu of the White House-for a year than it does to fund the National Endowment for the Arts for the same amount of time.

While the numbers of that statistic have yet to be corroborated, the point stands: The proposed budget exposes not just an imbalance in priorities on the part of those proposing it, but a personal vendetta against social services and environmental protection, designed to enrich the wealthiest at the expense of the majority. Spending on security for Trump Tower and Mar a Lago is wasteful, say opponents, and were those funds freed, they would benefit millions.

I have enjoyed hearing these arguments because, whether those making them realize it or not, they are engaging in abolitionist thinking.

When I say 'abolition', I am not referring (directly) to the movement of the mid 1800s, heralded by ex-slaves and white progressives, to permanently end the institution of chattel slavery. Rather, I am speaking of the modern movement to abolish the prison and police systems as the remaining vestiges of chattel slavery. This growing school of thought is heavily influenced by the original abolitionist movement, and one of its primary tenets is pulling resources from police, prisons and the military and reinvesting them into social services.

While there are jarring political shifts happening in this watershed moment, it's notable that many of the same parties-mainly white liberals-that have called prison and police abolition impossible are now calling for the defunding of the president's private security to bolster arts and education. These are the types of demands Black and Brown organizers have been making for decades, if not much longer.

One of the most surprising points of this argument is from where it suggests funding be cut. While Trump may be one of the most disliked new presidents in history, it's a big deal for a swelling portion of the public to believe that security for the president is not actually that important. It would be easy to make the same arguments that are always used to halt structural shifts: 'It's a matter of national security'; 'Protecting the First Family has to be a priority'; 'Spending these resources shields us from the possibility of greater catastrophe.' Yet, the extreme ludicrousness of the Trump budget is opening up more eyes to something that those on the margins have long understood: 'Safety' is never the true goal of security or militarism, but is always a con meant to protect the interests of power. True safety comes not from amassing weaponry, but from sharing resources.

Last summer, while working as a camp counselor during the week that Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were both shot by law enforcement, I ended up sitting down with a group of almost entirely wealthy, white elementary-aged kids to talk about the police. One of the questions we asked ourselves was why there was so much violence in certain parts of our city, namely on the South and West sides, and not in others. One student suggested that maybe it was because there weren't enough police to protect those neighborhoods.

We sat on the floor of an arts studio in Lincoln Square, a majority white and very wealthy neighborhood on the North side, in which many of the students lived. I asked them how often, when walking to camp, they had seen police cars patrolling the neighborhood, or stopping people on the street. Almost none of them had. I admitted that I hadn't, either.

"If there are so few police in this neighborhood," I asked, "why do we feel safe here?"

It took a moment for the young people to think it through, but they got there on their own: Resources. There was low crime in Lincoln Square because most people there had places to live and good food to eat. There were lots of stores and restaurants, and people could afford to shop and dine there. There were quality schools, libraries, parks and after-school programs, many of them within walking distance from one another. It was access to the basic things people needed, not the presence of police, that made its residents feel secure.

I could have cited the annual city budget, nearly 40% of which is allotted to the Chicago Police Department, compared to around 1% for Chicago Public Schools. (No, that's not a typo.) I could have explained that police keep Lincoln Square safe not by patrolling it, but by containing poverty, homelessness, and mental health crises in other parts of the city. But those truths were not necessary in that moment. What was needed was to help those young people see what many more people of privilege are learning to see: That they already have a clear vision of a world without prisons and police. It's the expansion of that vision which can provide real healing for the US' legacies of violence-in which the police and prison systems are squarely entrenched-and create safety for our cities in their entirety, not just their wealthy, white parts.

The same principle is at play when another privileged person, or their offspring, are let off for committing an unspeakable act of violence, while there are hundreds of thousands of poor, Black and Brown people sitting in prison for doing much less. When a Massachusetts judge recently failed to sentence 18-year-old white athlete David Becker to any jail time for sexually assaulting two women, he said that two years in prison "...would have destroyed this kid's life." This, too, is abolitionist thinking. The injustice is not merely that David Becker didn't go to jail, but that, assuredly, that same judge did sentence countless Black and Brown young people for drug possession or carrying unlicensed weapons, knowing full well he was ruining their lives.

We must ask not simply why Becker didn't go to jail, but why so many others have, when it is common knowledge on the part of its keepers that prison doesn't transform, but merely destroys. We must ask why we continue to use jail time as a response to sexual assault, when the prison system itself relies on sexual violence to intimidate and humiliate the incarcerated, especially when they are women, trans, queer and femme.

This is not to belittle the violence committed by David Becker, or other people of privilege that have evaded incarceration. Abolition asks us to imagine accountability outside of the systems that perpetuate violence, often by inflicting the same harm on perpetrators for which they are being punished. If the wealthy know prison is not what is needed to hold their children accountable, why have they decided it is suited for the children of the poor? If they can survive in a world without prisons, why can't everyone else?

Abolition teaches us to transform our reactions to individual traumatic events into codified political commitments. There is no more salient time than now for us to do so. If we oppose mass deportation under Trump, we must ask ourselves why we didn't speak up when Obama deported more people than any other president in US history. If we oppose Betsy Devos' plans for public education, we must ask ourselves why we didn't resist the same policies when they were instituted by Arne Duncan, Rahm Emanuel, when they only targeted Black and Brown districts, instead of the entire Department of Education. If we find Trump's anti-Muslim rhetoric heinous, we must examine how Islamophobia has consistently been used by those in power over the last several decades to justify militarization and invasion across the globe.

If we only oppose bans, only oppose bills, only oppose the individual politicians proposing them, we risk the likelihood of allowing the exact same measures to pass in the future when friendlier faces are pushing them through. Abolition means transforming our desires for change into a commitment to long-term, structural reimaginings. It means understanding that we must terminate, not beautify, the institutions that only cause harm.

A perfect example of these commitments in action is the #DefyDefendExpand campaign, spearheaded by Mijente and Black Youth Project 100. It's a platform which seeks to harness the energy around the sanctuary movement, shaping it into a radical fight against deportation, criminalization and the departments which depend on them. By expanding the idea of what sanctuary means, organizers haven't just created a larger audience for their message, and a wider base of communities with which to organize. They have dramatically shifted the conversation around sanctuary to one not of saviorism, but of resistance and abolition. Sanctuary, they state, is only truly possible when there is no fear of deportation-which logically means the abolition of ICE, of borders, and of all criminalization. This is the philosophy every one of our actions must adopt.

In a pertinent teach-in on the underground railroad held last month in Chicago, facilitator Mariame Kaba laid out the radicalizing impacts of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Up until its passing, free Black people largely sided with white liberals on the question of slavery, opposing it morally but falling on a wide spectrum of opinions around the institution's reform. The 1850 act made it so that escaped slaves were no longer the lost property of their individual masters, but could be put under arrest by any white citizen-effectively making all white people into cops, and placing all Black people-free or not-in danger of incarceration.

This created a dramatic shift, both in Black solidarity and the abolitionist movement. Free Black people could no longer imagine themselves as separate from slaves, as safe from institutional racism by virtue of their class status. Black freedom would necessarily mean opposing the institution of slavery at its core, which meant fighting for its immediate-and not gradual-abolition.

We are experiencing another moment just like that one, of polarization, but also of clarity. Those whose distance from the front lines made it possible to deny their harshness, whose privilege allowed them the luxury of nuance, are now realizing there are clear sides drawn, and the time has come to pick one. We can strengthen our borders, or we can open them. We can ban Muslims, or we can finally identify the true sources of global terror. We can continue to rely on prisons to absorb the costs of our social irresponsibility, or we can equitably fund public schools, affordable housing, free mental health services, universal healthcare.

The fear of a restructured world is merely the fear of change. For, in reality, police- and prison-free zones already exist-just as a world without borders, unbridled mobility, total removal from violence, and unlimited resources, is already real. The problem is this world is only real for transnational corporations, the warmongers, the elite.

Becoming an abolitionist (or acknowledging that you already are one) means demanding that this vision of our world be made real for all.
Special thanks to Iliana Figueroa

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The Trump administration has proposed its first federal budget. As expected, it promises to cut back or remove funding for environmental protection, after-school programs and the arts, while dramatically upping spending on the military, law enforcement and national security.

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Everyday Feminism, 9 minutes

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NPR Throughline Podcast

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Jun Fujita/Chicago History Museum/Getty Images

Black Americans being victimized and killed by the police is an epidemic. A truth many Americans are acknowledging since the murder of George Floyd, as protests have occurred in all fifty states calling for justice on his behalf. But this tension between African American communities and the police has existed for centuries. This week, the origins of American policing and how those origins put violent control of Black Americans at the heart of the system.
If you would like to read more about the topic: We love to hear from our listeners! Tweet at us @throughlineNPR, send us an , or leave us a voicemail at (872) 588-8805.

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Black Americans being victimized and killed by the police is an epidemic. A truth many Americans are acknowledging since the murder of George Floyd, as protests have occurred in all fifty states calling for justice on his behalf. But this tension between African American communities and the police has existed for centuries.

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When Cameron Doomadgee was found dead in the Palm Island police station, his injuries were like those of someone who'd been in a fatal car crash. The police claimed he had tripped on a step. The Palm Islanders rioted and burnt down the police station. The subsequent trial of Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley - who had been decorated for his work in Aboriginal communities - made headlines day after day, shadowed by Queensland police threatening to strike.

THE TALL MAN tells the gripping story of the trial, of the complex Senior Sergeant Chris Hurley, and of the Doomadgee family as they struggle to understand what happened to their brother. Atmospheric, gritty and original, The Tall Man takes the viewer into the courtroom, into the once notorious Queensland police force, and into the Indigenous community of Palm Island of Australia's Far North - places where people live lives like no others, have a relationship with the land like no others, and a history, culture and a catastrophic present like no others. This is Australia, but an Australia few of us have seen.

Based on the book by Chloe Hooper.

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When Cameron Doomadgee was found dead in the Palm Island police station, his injuries were like those of someone who'd been in a fatal car crash. The police claimed he had tripped on a step. The Palm Islanders rioted and burnt down the police station.

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by Alex S. Vitale
Ebook currently available for free

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Recent years have seen an explosion of protest against police brutality and repression. Among activists, journalists and politicians, the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Unfortunately, these reforms will not produce results, either alone or in combination. The core of the problem must be addressed: the nature of modern policing itself.

This book attempts to spark public discussion by revealing the tainted origins of modern policing as a tool of social control. It shows how the expansion of police authority is inconsistent with community empowerment, social justice-even public safety. Drawing on groundbreaking research from across the world, and covering virtually every area in the increasingly broad range of police work, Alex Vitale demonstrates how law enforcement has come to exacerbate the very problems it is supposed to solve.

In contrast, there are places where the robust implementation of policing alternatives-such as legalization, restorative justice, and harm reduction-has led to a decrease in crime, spending, and injustice. The best solution to bad policing may be an end to policing.

" The End of Policing combines the best in academic research with rhetorical urgency to explain why the ordinary array of police reforms will be ineffective in reducing abusive policing. Alex Vitale shows that we must move beyond conceptualizing public safety as interdiction, exclusion, and arrest if we hope to achieve racial and economic justice."

" The End of Policing's great strength lies in demonstrating that if the shape of American policing is historical, it is also contingent. We could have made different choices regarding how we set about securing the public against the array of threats that confront it, and - refreshingly, at this moment of general despair - Vitale believes we still can."

"Deeply researched, but also vibrantly and accessibly written, The End of Policing is essential reading for anyone wishing to understand the dire state of policing today. Alex Vitale shows compellingly that as long as we ask the police to shore up a fundamentally unequal and dysfunctional social order, superficial 'reforms' won't do much to help. And he offers concrete alternatives aimed at restoring communities and getting police out of the business of trying to contain social problems that they cannot-and should not-control."

"An extremely vital book on policing. Should be assigned at all police academies. If only the Philando Castile jurors had read this."

"Challenging standard accounts of how to reform policing, Alex Vitale argues that true safety demands directing resources away from police and prisons and towards economic development, education, and drug treatment. Urgent, provocative, and timely, The End of Policing will make you question most of what you have been taught to believe about crime and how to solve it."

"Unfortunately, neither increased diversity in police forces nor body cameras nor better training make any seeming difference. We need to restructure our society and put resources into communities themselves, an argument Alex Vitale makes very persuasively."

"Vitale's amassing of trenchant facts into an enticing intellectual framework makes The End of Policing a must-read for anyone interesting in waging and winning the fight for economic and social justice."

" The End of Policing is that holiday argument book, the relatively brief stack of facts you can hand to a relative who still talks about those nice guys who helped out with the flat tire and doesn't see why any lives have to matter more than they already do. A thorough rinsing of the American criminal justice system."

"Suggests a radical alternative that, on the one hand, abolishes corrupt and lethal police policies designed to contain the racialised poor and, on the other, develops and sustains safer communities."

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Recent years have seen an explosion of protest against police brutality and repression. Among activists, journalists and politicians, the conversation about how to respond and improve policing has focused on accountability, diversity, training, and community relations. Unfortunately, these reforms will not produce results, either alone or in combination.

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NPR Thoroughline

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Black Americans being victimized and killed by the police is an epidemic. A truth many Americans are acknowledging since the murder of George Floyd, as protests have occurred in all fifty states calling for justice on his behalf. But this tension between African American communities and the police has existed for centuries. This week, the origins of American policing and how those origins put violent control of Black Americans at the heart of the system.
If you would like to read more about the topic: We love to hear from our listeners! Tweet at us @throughlineNPR, send us an , or leave us a voicemail at (872) 588-8805.

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Black Americans being victimized and killed by the police is an epidemic. A truth many Americans are acknowledging since the murder of George Floyd, as protests have occurred in all fifty states calling for justice on his behalf. But this tension between African American communities and the police has existed for centuries.

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Rolling Stone Magazine

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Editor's note: This story was originally published on December 16th, 2014, following the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, black men who were killed by police. In recent days, in the wake of nationwide protests demanding justice for George Floyd, we are sharing some of our previous coverage about how to end systematic racism in America.
After months of escalating protests and grassroots organizing in response to the police killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, police reformers have issued many demands. The moderates in this debate typically qualify their rhetoric with "We all know we need police, but..." It's a familiar refrain to those of us who've spent years in the streets and the barrios organizing around police violence, only to be confronted by officers who snarl, "But who'll help you if you get robbed?" We can put a man on the moon, but we're still lacking creativity down here on Earth.

But police are not a permanent fixture in society. While law enforcers have existed in one form or another for centuries, the modern police have their roots in the relatively recent rise of modern property relations 200 years ago, and the "disorderly conduct" of the urban poor. Like every structure we've known all our lives, it seems that the policing paradigm is inescapable and everlasting, and the only thing keeping us from the precipice of a dystopic Wild West scenario. It's not. Rather than be scared of our impending Road Warrior future, check out just a few of the practicable, real-world alternatives to the modern system known as policing:

Unarmed mediation and intervention teams

Unarmed but trained people, often formerly violent offenders themselves, patrolling their neighborhoods to curb violence right where it starts. This is real and it exists in cities from Detroit to Los Angeles. Stop believing that police are heroes because they are the only ones willing to get in the way of knives or guns - so are the members of groups like Cure Violence, who were the subject of the 2012 documentary The Interrupters. There are also feminist models that specifically organize patrols of local women, who reduce everything from cat-calling and partner violence to gang murders in places like Brooklyn. While police forces have benefited from military-grade weapons and equipment, some of the most violent neighborhoods have found success through peace rather than war.

The decriminalization of almost every nonviolent crime

What is considered criminal is something too often debated only in critical criminology seminars, and too rarely in the mainstream. Violent offenses count for a fraction of the 11 to 14 million arrests every year, and yet there is no real conversation about what constitutes a crime and what permits society to put a person in chains and a cage. Decriminalization doesn't work on its own: The cannabis trade that used to employ poor Blacks, Latinos, indigenous and poor whites in its distribution is now starting to be monopolized by already-rich landowners. That means that wide-scale decriminalization will need to come with economic programs and community projects. To quote investigative journalist Christian Parenti' s remarks on criminal justice reform in his book Lockdown America, what we really need most of all is "less."

Also known as reparative or transformative justice, these models represent an alternative to courts and jails. From hippie communes to the IRA and anti-Apartheid South African guerrillas to even some U.S. cities like Philadelphia's experiment with community courts, spaces are created where accountability is understood as a community issue and the entire community, along with the so-called perpetrator and the victim of a given offense, try to restore and even transform everyone in the process. It has also been used uninterrupted by indigenous and Afro-descendant communities like San Basilio de Palenque in Colombia for centuries, and it remains perhaps the most widespread and far-reaching of the alternatives to the adversarial court system.

Direct democracy at the community level

Reducing crime is not about social control. It's not about cops, and it's not a bait-and-switch with another callous institution. It's giving people a sense of purpose. Communities that have tools to engage with each other about problems and disputes don't have to consider what to do after anti-social behaviors are exhibited in the first place. A more healthy political culture where people feel more involved is a powerful building block to a less violent world.

This one is a wildcard. Community patrols can have dangerous racial overtones, from pogroms to the KKK to George Zimmerman. But they can also be an option that replaces police with affected community members when police are very obviously the criminals. In Mexico, where one of the world's most corrupt police forces only has credibility as a criminal syndicate, there have been armed groups of Policia Comunitaria and Autodefensas organized by local residents for self-defense from narcotraffickers, femicide and police. Obviously these could become police themselves and then be subject to the same abuses, but as a temporary solution they have been making a real impact. Power corrupts, but perhaps in Mexico, withering power won't have enough time to corrupt.

In 2012, Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed up the last trauma clinics in some of Chicago's most violent neighborhoods. In New York, Rikers Island jails as many people with mental illnesses "as all 24 psychiatric hospitals in New York State combined," which is reportedly 40 percent of the people jailed at Rikers. We have created a tremendous amount of mental illness, and in the real debt and austerity dystopia we're living in, we have refused to treat each other for our physical and mental wounds. Mental health has often been a trapdoor for other forms of institutionalized social control as bad as any prison, but shifting toward preventative, supportive, and independent living care can help keep those most impacted from ending up in handcuffs or dead on the street.

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Editor's note: This story was originally published on December 16th, 2014, following the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, black men who were killed by police. In recent days, in the wake of nationwide protests demanding justice for George Floyd, we are sharing some of our previous coverage about how to end systematic racism in America.

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Article in Scalawag Magazine

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Late in the evening on May 27th, 1821, Joe Forest and two accomplices canoed down the Santee River to South Island, nestled between the major port cities of Charleston and Georgetown in South Carolina.[1] The three fugitive slaves arrived on George Ford's plantation to steal some cattle for provisions for their camp further up river; such raids were commonplace for maroons who chose not to flee the South and instead made a life for themselves in the swamps and wilderness surrounding plantations.[2] While the men were slaughtering a cow and preparing it for the journey, George Ford was alerted to their presence and came out to pursue the men. Rather than face capture or death at the hands of the planter, the maroons shot at George Ford, who died almost instantly. On that night there began a three year search for Joe and his maroon gang by the White citizenry of coastal South Carolina, resulting in the first official police association in the area where Joe's camp was hidden.

Fast forward to 2015, a year when police in the United States killed 1,207 people. Young Black men are five times more likely to be killed by the police than White men of their same age. Simultaneously, the police are under perhaps the greatest scrutiny they have ever faced as an institution in this country. The riots in Ferguson and Baltimore and Oakland, the occupation of a police precinct in Minneapolis, and the waves of solidarity marches, riots, blockades, highway and bridge takeovers, and economic disruption that followed, have all brought tremendous attention to police training, their technologies, their structure, and their individual members. Some of this attention is the managed product of media outlets and politicians during an election season, almost totally divorced from the lived elements of unrest of the past two years. However, there are also many people asking real questions about the history and role of the cops, and what it could be like to live without them.

The histories contained in this piece are brought back to life when we directly attend to these questions. In reviving these histories, we rely on knowledge that has been generated by generations of mostly Black scholars and researchers, but also lives in the bodies and minds of freedom fighters, grandparents, storytellers, healers, artists, and lovers.

We argue that policing evolved as a method of control to enforce and protect a key economic foundation in the development of American (and global) capitalism: slavery. Policing also functioned to produce a society grounded in the "social death" of Black people.[3] Modern policing continued to evolve after chattel slavery to maintain the racialized division of labor and social divisions that slavery created, but which now (in a post-Emancipation society) had to be reproduced by other forms. This reproduction of authority, wealth, and White supremacy never ceased, and in many ways it has only grown stronger and more insidious.

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In the downtimes between national crises around unarmed police killings, all but the tiniest sliver of our society's discourse around the police isolates that institution as a "natural" arm of that other great "natural" phenomenon, the law--and as a phenomenon without a history. We can read this discourse in part as a set of creation myths, meant to justify the unique power the police have over life and death. And so it is not surprising that the logics of reform and progress, which seek to better but not break with society, rest on an assumption of the inevitability of the police, prison, and the law. But we show here that the police have a beginning, and so may also have an end. We present this piece not as a work of original research, but as our own collected notes and understanding of these inextricable links between slavery, capitalism, police, and civil society. We write this not simply to "set the record straight" on the history of police, as many have already done that work more completely elsewhere, but to understand how that might speak to our ongoing efforts to destroy the system that has been imposed upon us.

One Beginning Among Many

Within days of slaveowner George Ford's death, the Governor of South Carolina delivered a proclamation, including physical descriptions of Joe and his accomplice "Jack," as well as a $200 state reward for their apprehension. Georgetown citizens volunteered their own $300 towards the maroons' capture. Four days after the Governor's Proclamation a local militia, the "Columbian Greens" apprehended Jack and brought him to Georgetown to be tried for the murder of George Ford. Meanwhile, Joe managed to escape the multiple militias and remained free for the rest of the summer.

Georgetown's Court of Magistrates and Freeholders-White, propertied men, and the formal predecessors of today's citizen jurors-found "the evidence conclusive" that Jack was culpable for George Ford's death. He was found guilty and sentenced to be hanged on June 8th. On June 12th, the Captain of the Columbian Greens petitioned the Governor for his reward, claiming personal responsibility for apprehending the maroon. Captain Carnes received the $200 state reward after his son H.L. Carnes Jr. served as one of the men who condemned Jack to his death.

For the next two years, Joe remained at large, his legacy and band growing all the while. Joe and other maroons, with whom he communed and conspired, survived in a well-fortified camp at the headwaters of the Santee River in the densest swamp between Georgetown and Columbia-impenetrable to outsiders.

Maroons posed more than an economic loss to the plantation economy-they threatened both the legitimacy of its existence and its secure future. Maroons were proof that it was possible to subvert White control by navigating the wilderness surrounding plantation and town borders, living a life free of both enslavement and, largely, of waged work. Alliances formed in these swamps that betrayed the White supremacist pact of planter economics-poor Whites who were marginalized from proper society would trade with and assist maroons, though less is documented about these alliances. Shamefully, more is known about the frequency with which non-slaveowning, poor Whites aligned themselves with the planter class by volunteering in the militias and patrols who hunted down escaped slaves. Their collusion with the planter class, with whom they shared little besides racial identity, was absolutely crucial during times like the 1820s when generalized slave insurrections were not only rumor, but planned conspiracy.

Poor Whites, for instance, proved crucial when Denmark Vesey, a free Black man in Charleston, conspired alongside hundreds of enslaved and free Blacks in coastal South Carolina to overthrow the White planter class of the coast, free slaves, and sail to Haiti. This plot was uncovered in the summer of 1822, while forces north of Charleston struggled to control the threat that Joe and his gang posed on the Georgetown planter class. The two governing districts ended up collaborating to apprehend Joe. This collaboration between Georgetown and Charleston points to the evolving geopolitics of southern capitalism: the control of slaves, and especially escaped slaves, became less of a private matter of the individual slave-owner and more a public responsibility of White society and capital. Thus, after two years of failed searches by militias and informal posses, in the fall of 1823, the citizens of Pineville looked toward a hybrid solution between the militia and the posse-the Police.

Instituting an elaborate system of rewards-including manumission (the buying of a loyal slave's freedom), the citizens surrounding Joe's camp formed their own Pineville Police Association in October of 1823, "specifically to deal with the threat posed by Joe and his gang." Their strategy was to force the collaboration of enslaved people against maroons. Within a few days, an enslaved river-boat driver named Royal, who had been dealing with Joe and the maroons in that area for years, volunteered to lure Joe out of the Camp with promise to trade. When Joe and three other maroons emerged from their encampment, they were fatally shot by 23 members of the Pineville Police Association. Joe's head was stuck on a pole at the mouth of the river, "as a solemn warning to vicious slaves." One year later, 81 planters from central South Carolina petitioned the Governor to free Royal for "bringing to merited punishment an offender, against the laws of the land and against the laws of God." The state agreed to pay Royal's owner seven-hundred dollars, declaring that it was "'the policy of this state to reward those slaves who thus distinguish themselves by way of inducement to others to do so.'"

The hanging of Jack in 1821, of Denmark Vesey in 1822, and the shooting of Joe in 1823 did not mean defeat for fugitive slaves in South Carolina, and both maroonage and northward escape would continue to pose viable threats to slavery up through the Civil War. Meanwhile, by 1839, the constitution of the Pineville Police Association clearly stated its purpose as "the enforcement of a rigid system of police and the suppression of all traffick with slaves." The documents left behind from the courts, the newspapers, and the small town police in the wake of Joe Forest's capture and death foreshadow a world 200 years later--a world where the FBI is still issuing rewards for self-identified fugitive slaves. Assata Shakur, an invaluable part of the Black liberation movement of the seventies, lives in political exile in Cuba where she identifies as a "20th century escaped slave." Shakur fled the U.S. prison system after enduring an unfair trial, in which she stood accused of killing a New Jersey cop during a traffic incident on May 2nd, 1973. Thirty years after the shooting, on May 2nd, 2013 the FBI renewed their investment to hunt down and capture Assata and now offer two million dollars for her extradition to the United States.

A Broader View of Early Policing Forces in the Antebellum South

The example of Joe Forest's rebellion and the emergence of Pineville's original Police Association offers one poignant snapshot of the origins of the police in the South. A broader picture, including the roles and development of policing bodies in both rural and urban areas, offers some more insight. Officially designated by authorities as "slave patrols," "alarm men," or "searchers," and nicknamed "paddyrollers" or "paterolers" by those they policed, these emerging institutions changed during the 18th and 19th centuries in ways that directly foreshadowed the institutional and structural character of modern police forces.[4]

The first slave patrols that emerged not only depended upon but often coercively required the help of White people in policing slaves, whether they were slaveowners or not. A 1690 law in South Carolina, for instance, demanded "all persons under penalty of forty shillings to arrest and chastise any slave outside of his home plantation without a proper pass." These White people were volunteers, in the sense that they were unpaid and held other jobs, but they sometimes faced real punishment, such as fines or jail time, if they refused their duties. In this way, these slave patrols not only provided for the security of this highly profitable mode of production, but directly enforced and reproduced early racial designations. Whiteness meant not only a structurally reinforced privilege, but implied a duty and obligation toward a state and economy that was both constituted through slavery, and needed it to thrive.

Patrols of this kind were empowered to capture runaways and beat slaves caught travelling without a pass. As concerns of active revolt took hold, they would preemptively break up slaves' gatherings, search their homes, and seize their possessions.[5] The distinction is important: the patrols performed their activities not simply as hastily assembled bands sent out to catch a group of runaways or put down an ongoing revolt, but as a preventative body of racial, social and labor control. In many places, these patrols were also tasked with governing disorderly Whites, in particular vagrants, outsiders, and those who would trade with fugitives and maroons.

The authority of slave patrols typically lay with the militia at first, though this changed. In Mississippi, for example, the patrols were first performed by federal troops, then by militiamen, then finally by groups of White men appointed by the county. Many rural patrols started off as temporary or part-time, and eventually transitioned to full-time policing bodies. Accompanying those changes was the specialization of the police themselves. Though it varied across the South, in many places these patrols evolved from groups of able-bodied, White, male volunteers to paid employees, sworn in by the state and thus indemnified against lawsuits.

Policing bodies in the city evolved along similar lines. In 1783 the city of Charleston formed a City Guard that patrolled as a company, wore muskets and swords, and was tasked with breaking up slave gatherings and cutting down on urban crime. In her book on slave patrols, historian Sally Hadden quotes an Englishman who visited Charleston in the 1850's: "It was a stirring scene when the drums beat at the Guard house in the public square...to witness the negroes scouring the streets in all directions, to get to their places of abode, many of them in great trepidation, uttering ejaculations of terror as they ran."

In cities like Charleston it was not uncommon for slaves to live in one part of the city while their owners lived in another, making difficult the more private system of discipline of the plantations. It was also common for owners to "hire out" their slaves, for a fee, to early urban manufacturing firms. Municipal and state governments recognized the threat to labor control represented by these developments-South Carolina banned the practice for 90 years-but the system of hiring out slaves was immensely profitable, and regulations against it went largely ignored. In this sense, urban police emerged and modernized during the historical and spatial intersection of industrialized labor and slavery. Industrialization and urbanization forced changes in and additions to the private, informal methods of discipline characteristic to the classical plantation system, but not with the intent to lessen White control over Black bodies, or to diminish an enormously profitable system of agrarian capitalism.

Though they varied in pace by city and region, these developments in social control-the slave patrols' preventative function; their specialization as a paid, permanent force; the establishment of civilian rather than military control over the patrols, ultimately by municipal authorities; and the patrols' role in policing racialized neighborhood territories of early industrial workers-all point directly towards modern policing.[6] These forces were already a modern (and modernizing) apparatus of social control long before the Civil War.

Transitions in Policing during Reconstruction

The modernity, industry, and racial "reconciliation" of the post-war period, imposed in part by Northern liberators, directly relied on and enhanced the role and structure of police. The Reconstruction period resulted in a power vacuum in much of the South, whereby experiments in freedom and self-determination could be undertaken with newfound brazenness. Maroons in places like North Carolina's Great Dismal Swamp and the Sea Islands continued their efforts at communal life, while former slaves in places like the Ogeechee Neck of lowcountry Georgia armed themselves, raided rice plantations, and occupied the(ir) land, declaring, "No Whites between the Ogeechees!" In Robeson County, North Carolina, a band of Lumbee Indians, former slaves, and disaffected Whites called the Lowry Gang exacted revenge on the plantation aristocracy by assassinating former Confederate officials, expropriating and redistributing crops, and refusing to work in the industrializing sectors of the economy.

It's important to remember that "emancipation" was a program that many Black people had already interpreted on their own terms and had been carrying out before and during the Civil War. In that context, and that of the post-war period where open, armed rebellion by laboring people was a serious threat, the project of northern institutions like that of the Freedmen's Bureau often had more to do with ensuring labor discipline in the newly emerging wage-labor economy than ensuring any kind of meaningful racial "justice." Eric Foner suggests that institution revealed itself to be the enforcer of the old economy in new terms:

The "two evils" against which the Bureau had to contend, an army officer observed in July 1865, were "cruelty on the part of the employer and shirking on the part of the negroes." Yet the Bureau, like the army, seemed to consider the Black reluctance to labor the greater threat to its economic mission. In some areas, agents continued the military's urban pass systems and vagrancy patrols, as well as the practice of rounding up unemployed laborers for shipments to plantations. Bureau courts in Memphis dispatched impoverished Blacks convicted of crimes to labor for Whites who would pay their fines.

It was not uncommon for northern White "liberators" to force former slaves to labor for their former masters at the point of a bayonet, often making use of the very same systems of identifying people and controlling their movement developed under slavery. Those systems of policing were indispensable to disciplining former slaves into the new exploitation of the wage, and thus crucial to the project of industrializing the South after the war. Militia patrols, rewards, bounty hunters, informants, and court structures, for example, were used both by former Confederates in Robeson County as well as northerners and Republicans in an attempt to stem the Lowry Gang's rebellion.

Ultimately, there evolved in the post-war period a "hybrid" system of discipline and social control in the South. This system integrated private forms of discipline consistent with the plantation, the publicly authorized rural and urban patrols alongside Northern judicial practices, institutions of social work and management like the Freedmen's Bureau, and industrialized modes of work and the wage. This meant that although there were already modernizing police forces in the South before the end of the war, those forces had to adapt to the post-war realities of controlling wage labor, unemployment, urbanization, and social codes of segregation all without the "help" of a legalized system of slavery.

Some Closing Notes on Policing, Whiteness, and Civil Society

It's beyond the scope of this piece to further elaborate on the continuity of anti-Blackness and White supremacy endemic to policing and the law after the period of Reconstruction. Suffice to say, White supremacy in America remained both literally and figuratively business as usual into the 20th century, during the periods defined by convict leasing, Jim Crow segregation, and the country's massive prison boom-the "afterlife of slavery" as author Saidiya Hartman has put it.

Plenty of folks will consider the painting of 21st century police as modern-day "slave catchers" as nothing more than metaphor and hyperbole. But as we (and many others) have already demonstrated, modernized police actually emerged in the South during slavery-they literally were slave catchers. We would ask those who desire an "accountable" or "just" police force: At what point in this history, in what period, do they believe that police became an institution that intended anything other than the reproduction of capital and the enforced social death of Black people? When has there ever been a break, either social or economic, political or existential, with this contiguous line of flight towards dispossession and misery? Slavery functions not just as the historical origin point of policing, but also as its continued ontological force and psychological foundation. How could there ever be "accountability" with such an institution?

Slavery itself can of course be defined by and considered from any number of theoretical viewpoints, of which we can only scratch the surface in this space. Two perspectives do seem necessary to mention here. First is a materialist perspective, which primarily defines slavery as an economic condition of bondage and forced labor. The other, suggested by historians like Orlando Patterson, defines slavery not so much by forced labor as by a threefold condition of dishonor or "social death," the systematic rupture of familial ties and genealogical continuity, and gratuitous violence.

Our interest here lies in considering how 21st century policing in fact fulfills the conditions of both perspectives. The police undeniably coerce labor participation in the capitalist economy and thereby reproduce patterns of forced labor, for example by securing unpaid labor for prison facilities, or by preventing acts of collective expropriation, criminalizing lifestyles that resist wage work, and policing the boundaries between the legal/illegal economies, all of which forces those without capital to sell our labor for a wage. Likewise, it's just as possible to see how police continue to fulfill the conditions of slavery identified by Patterson, for example by breaking up familial connections via the mass removal of Black bodies from their communities into the prison system, destroying Black social organization with programs like COINTELPRO, or enacting limitless violence against young Black people in poorer neighborhoods across the country.

The other aspect to this role of police in reproducing conditions of slavery is their role in the reproduction of Whiteness, not just as a set of assumed, individual privileges but also as a structurally reinforced civil duty to the state via inclusion in the social body, citizenship, and Humanity itself. The genesis of this duty is clear in the use of White, non-slaveowning volunteers in the early slave patrols and in the deputizing of White people for the posse comitatus, among many other possible examples.[7] To quote Saidiya Hartman again, "The slave is the object or the ground that makes possible the existence of the bourgeois subject and, by negation or contradistinction, defines liberty, citizenship, and the enclosures of the social body." It follows that the policing of Black people implies, again by contradistinction, a White inclusion in the social body that indicates a specific relationship to the state.

This has real consequences that can only be touched upon here, both in its challenge to the individualizing discourse of privilege politics, so hegemonic in Left circles, as well as in its challenge to the traditional sphere of legitimized (Black or White) activist politics we call "civil society." It raises practical questions for those of us who wish to not just understand policing but actively undermine and destroy it. How do certain forms of activism reinforce a civil relation to the state as a prerequisite for "change"? If the terrain of civil society is inherently and permanently marked by Whiteness, capitalism, and state structures, what forms of organizing against the police are less (or not) limited by this terrain?

These are just some of the questions attending to the history of slavery and policing, as those forces continue to haunt both normal, daily life as well as the increasingly common moments where that normality is ruptured in some way. But slavery doesn't just hover in the background like a specter from another century; it actively tells us who we are and where our loyalties lie, it distinguishes the dead from the living, it holds the keys to prison cells and patrols our streets.

[1] All original research about Joe Forest and the maroon struggle of South Carolina in this section can be found in Timothy Lockley Maroon Communities in South Carolina: A documentary record (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2009), 93-120. As well as Timothy Lockley and David Doddington "Maroon and Slave Communities in South Caroling Before 1865." The South Carolina Historical Magazine Volume 113, No. 2 (April 2012). The sequence of events and original court and newspaper documentation can all be found in those sources. The stylizing of narrative is our own.

[2] "Maroon" is a term that originated from the Spanish "cimarron" meaning "wild, not tame" typically referring to domestic livestock that went into the woods, escaping their pastures. However, this word morphed over time into a self-identified term by more permanently escaped slaves who led slave revolts from the Caribbean to Brazil to the American South. Lockley, Maroon Communities, ix.

[3] We use the concept of "social death" in the tradition of historians of slavery such as Orlando Patterson and Saidiya Hartman. Implied is not just physical, violent dispossession but a dispossession of and from both place and self, whereby one is separated not only from their past but also from possible future generations. In such a context, one is not simply made to labor for others, but in fact entirely excluded from the category of Human.

[4] Most of the research for this section can be found in the new edition of Kristian Williams' excellent and exhaustive book, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. Kristian Williams, Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America. (Oakland: AK Press, 2015).

[5] One is reminded of the 1984 Comprehensive Crime Control Act which, among an array of get-tough-on-crime policies, expanded the state's ability to seize the assets of convicted or accused drug dealers. The act established a direct and ingenious tool for the financial reproduction of the departments themselves. Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford, Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South. (Oakland: AK Press, 2015), 248-249.

[6] We owe some of our taxonomies of police functions to Kristian Williams' criteria that distinguish "modern" policing from its earlier forms. Ibid., 53-54.

[7] Likewise, every car that passes by on the highway with a "thin blue line" sticker is a modern-day reminder of this, best understood not as a symbolic political support of law enforcement but as the expression of a conscious social contract between White citizens and the police.

References & Suggested Reading

Anonymous. "Between Strangers and Friends: Reading Baldwin and Genet," Baeden: Journal of Queer Time Travel Vol. 3 (2015): 53-114.

Eric Foner. A Short History of Reconstruction. New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1990.

Frank Wilderson."'We're Trying to Destroy the World:' Anti-Blackness and Police Violence after Ferguson." Chicago: Ill Will Editions, 2014.

K. Aarons. "No Selves to Abolish: Afropessimism, Anti-Politics, and the End of the World." Chicago: Ill Will Editions, 2016.

Kristian Williams. Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America (Third Edition). Oakland, California: AK Press, 2015.

Neal Shirley and Saralee Stafford. Dixie Be Damned: 300 Years of Insurrection in the American South. Oakand, California: AK Press, 2015.

Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982).

Saidiya Hartman. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997.

Sally E. Hadden. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge, Massachussetts: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Tim Lockley and David Doddington. "Maroon and Slave Communities in South Caroling Before 1865." The South Carolina Historical Magazine Volume 113, No. 2 (April 2012).

Timothy James Lockley. Maroon Communities in South Carolina: A Documentary Record. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2009.

WEB Dubois. Black Reconstruction in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2007.

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Late in the evening on May 27th, 1821, Joe Forest and two accomplices canoed down the Santee River to South Island, nestled between the major port cities of Charleston and Georgetown in South Carolina.[1] The three fugitive slaves arrived on George Ford's plantation to steal some cattle for provisions for

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Legal scholarship on the Movement for Black Lives policy platform, “A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice.”

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76 Pages Posted: 1 Nov 2017 Last revised: 25 Jul 2018

Date Written: July 25, 2018

Abstract

In this Article, I consider the contemporary law reform project of a radical social movement seeking to transform the state: specifically, the Movement for Black Lives policy platform, "A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice." The Movement for Black Lives is the leading example of a contemporary racial justice movement with an intersectional politics including feminist and anti-capitalist commitments. The visions of such radical social movements offer an alternative epistemology for understanding and addressing structural inequality and injustice. By studying not only the critiques offered by radical social movements, but also their visions for transformative change, the edges of law scholarship can be expanded, a deeper set of critiques and a longer set of histories-of colonialism and settler colonialism, the Atlantic slave trade and mass incarceration-centered, and a bolder project of transformation forwarded. These visions should push legal scholars toward a broader frame for understanding how law, the market, and the state co-produce intersectional structural inequality, and toward agendas that focus not on building the power of law and law enforcement, but on transforming the state and society and building the power of marginalized communities. This shift would invigorate the social movements literature and bring new energy to scholarship on substantive areas of law, from criminal and immigration law to property and contract law.

To illustrate the creative potential of studying radical social movements, this Article considers policing the Vision for Black Lives with the Department of Justice's (DOJ) Ferguson and Baltimore reports. The Vision and DOJ reports offer alternate conceptualizations of the problem of policing and the appropriate approach to law reform. Reflective of liberal law reform projects on police, the DOJ reports identify policing as a fundamental tool of law and order that serves the collective interests of society, and locate the problems of police in their failure to adhere to constitutional law. As a remedy, the DOJ reports advocate for investing more resources in police: more trainings, better supervision, community policing. In contrast, the Vision identifies policing as a historical and violent force in Black communities underpinning a system of racial capitalism and limiting the possibilities of Black life. Here, law is central to the shape and legitimation of racialized violence and inequality. The Vision's reimagination of policing-rooted in Black history and Black intellectual traditions-transforms mainstream approaches to reform. The Vision demands shrinking the large footprint of policing, surveillance, and incarceration, and shifting resources into other social programs in Black communities: housing, health care, jobs, and schools. It focuses on building power in Black communities, and fundamentally transforming the relationship between government, market, and society. In forwarding an abolitionist imagination, the movement offers transformative, affirmative visions for change designed to address the structures of inequality-something legal scholarship has for far too long lacked.

Keywords: law reform, social movements, policing, police violence, mass incarceration, Black Lives Matter, Movement for Black Lives, racial capitalism, abolition

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76 Pages Posted: 1 Nov 2017 Last revised: 25 Jul 2018 Date Written: July 25, 2018 In this Article, I consider the contemporary law reform project of a radical social movement seeking to transform the state: specifically, the Movement for Black Lives policy platform, "A Vision for Black Lives: Policy Demands for Black Power, Freedom, and Justice."

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VISION FOR BLACK LIVES

Black humanity and dignity requires Black political will and power. Despite constant exploitation and perpetual oppression, Black people have bravely and brilliantly been the driving force pushing the U.S. towards the ideals it articulates but has never achieved.

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Black humanity and dignity requires Black political will and power. Despite constant exploitation and perpetual oppression, Black people have bravely and brilliantly been the driving force pushing the U.S. towards the ideals it articulates but has never achieved.

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Law enforcement and private security work together to raid Standing Rock protest camp. Part 8 of a 15-part series by The Intercept entitled "Oil and Water."

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One year ago today, on October 27, 2016, hundreds of law enforcement officers descended on a small resistance camp that stood directly in the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline, forcibly evicting residents and arresting 142 people - more than on any other day in the 11-month-long Standing Rock struggle. Seven people, all Native American, were slapped with rare federal charges, and additional cases stemming from the raid continue to move through the North Dakota legal system.

Although it was not the most violent confrontation between the pipeline resistance and law enforcement, no other incident better illustrates the collaboration between federal, local, and state police and private security in suppressing the NoDAPL movement, nor would any be as symbolic of the historic proportions of the native-led fight. A year later, two other pipeline fights - against Enbridge Line 3 and Keystone XL - are brewing nearby in South Dakota, Nebraska, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. As indigenous leaders in those fights stand again on treaty rights against the pipelines, the October 27 standoff and the eviction of Treaty Camp have become a roadmap for both water protectors and law enforcement as they prepare for battles to come.

The Intercept has obtained hours of police bodycam and aerial footage, as well as photographs, audio recordings, and a large set of incident reports describing police activities during the October 27 raid. That material, selections of which appear below, along with interviews with more than a dozen water protectors who were present that day, paints the most detailed picture yet of the most dramatic standoff between indigenous people and U.S. police forces in over four decades.

Drive north on Highway 1806 through the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, cross the Cannonball River, and you enter unceded treaty territory - land indigenous people never agreed to relinquish.

Immediately north of the river begins federal land controlled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, where the largest Dakota Access Pipeline resistance camp, known as Oceti Sakowin, was located for seven months beginning in August 2016. Just north of there, the Dakota Access Pipeline now crosses the highway. Energy Transfer Partners bought the property on either side of the road, known as Cannonball Ranch. The legality of its sale to ETP is questionable under a North Dakota law that blocks corporations from buying agricultural land. But North Dakota law aside, native historians say, that land should never have been for sale: It belongs to the Sioux. If the Fort Laramie treaties in 1851 and 1868 had been honored, the site would still be controlled by the Great Sioux Nation.

For water protectors, the fight against the pipeline was only the latest episode in two centuries of native resistance to U.S. government incursion into the northern Great Plains, part of a lineage that includes the 1876 Battle of Greasy Grass, where indigenous people defeated the U.S. 7th Cavalry in defense of their treaty rights to South Dakota's Black Hills; the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee, where as many as 300 Lakota people were killed by U.S. soldiers; and the 1973 occupation of Wounded Knee, where armed members of the American Indian Movement faced off with federal agents in protest of a corrupt local government and the U.S. government's legacy of broken treaties.

This latest confrontation was not supposed to involve guns - the water protectors were mostly committed to unarmed opposition - but it did invoke that bloody history.

Law enforcement planned to evict the Treaty Camp on October 26, but a soupy fog descended on the hills. A small envoy of local, state, and federal officers drove toward the blockade that water protectors had erected on the highway to keep police out.

They were greeted by Mekasi Camp Horinek, a member of the Ponca tribe from Oklahoma, whose uncle Carter Camp helped organize the Wounded Knee occupation in 1973. He was joined by several other pipeline opponents.

The negotiators talked in circles, with Horinek and his companions returning repeatedly to the issue of the Fort Laramie treaties, which law enforcement repeatedly argued was not their jurisdiction.

"So is this about water and oil, or is this about 140 years?" Cass County Sheriff Paul Laney replied, referring to the Great Sioux War, which ended with the U.S. government's annexation of the sacred Black Hills.

"Everything. All of that. We've had enough. We've had enough," one of the water protectors said.

As the conversation broke down, Horinek declared, "Highway 1806 is now a no-surrender line, and that camp is no retreat."

"That's your final word?" Laney asked.

"That's the final word," Horinek replied.

Reflecting on that day nearly a year later, Horinek explained that the experiences of native people 140 years ago are impossible to disentangle from the poverty and environmental contamination seen across Indian Country today.

To him, the October 27 raid was a visible reminder that the past is present. "I wanted the world to see this militarized force coming in like it's the 1800s with their gatling guns and their advanced weaponry," he told The Intercept. "I wanted pictures of them slashing those teepees; I wanted pictures of them pulling open those teepees and arresting families."

In the weeks preceding the founding of the Treaty Camp, direct action had become a daily ritual for residents of the resistance camps nearby. On some mornings, convoys of cars carrying water protectors would weave through the hills toward construction sites or government buildings identified as protest targets. A team of lawyers stood at the ready to assist those who were arrested and detained. But the temperature was dropping below freezing at night. Winter would doubtlessly sap energy from the movement.

Meanwhile, scouts and drones sent out into the hills were returning with reports that the construction was getting closer to the highway crossing and to the river.

Water protectors felt a growing sense of urgency.

Joye Braun came to the NoDAPL movement already a veteran pipeline fighter. She was involved with a Keystone XL opposition camp on South Dakota's Cheyenne River Sioux reservation. After Obama's State Department denied Keystone XL a key permit, putting it to a halt, Braun became the first person to pitch a teepee at the first DAPL resistance camp, called Sacred Stone.

"The only way you can stop a pipeline when it gets that drastic is to go in front of it," Braun said. "This was our land. This is our land."

According to treaties signed between the U.S. government and indigenous nations in the 19th century, Cannonball Ranch - the land DAPL eventually purchased - should have never been for sale.

That's because the pipeline route cuts through land that the 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty, intended to buy peace and safe passage for settlers moving through the area, established as belonging to the Sioux. In 1868, the treaty was superseded by a second treaty that established the Great Sioux reservation. But while that treaty created a reservation whose borders were further south, it also determined that the land DAPL bought was "unceded Indian territory" - a designation that holds to this day, despite the beliefs of some U.S. elected officials.

"Unceded land is land that was never given over or conceded; it's essentially stolen land," Nick Estes, a Lakota historian, told The Intercept. Cannonball Ranch, specifically, was "illegally settled," Estes said, and acquired as private property through squatters' rights.

Only an act of Congress can abridge a treaty, opening unceded territory for non-native settlement, Estes said - but that never happened with this particular land, the status of which remains disputed. Disputes over unceded land have arisen before - most notably over the Black Hills, which resulted in a 1980 Supreme Court decision that offered a monetary settlement as reparation for the settled land - but no actual land restitution. Indigenous people have refused to take that money.

"Turning private land back into indigenous land ... is near impossible," said Estes. "Private property always trumps indigenous land rights, and that's just how the federal system works."

"People think ... oh, that was back in the 1800s, and that was a long time ago, and those don't have any merit today," said Braun. "That's my land, that's the Lakota and Dakota people of this territory."

On October 23, Braun moved her teepee to what would become the Treaty Camp. But she never doubted that a police confrontation was imminent. Two days earlier, police had moved their staging area from the Mandan airport, a 40-minute drive from the heart of the protests, to Fort Rice, 10 minutes away.

"I think every night I only got about an hour of sleep because we were constantly under threat of them moving in," Braun said. "There were constant rumors - they're coming, they're coming, they're coming."

Then, on the morning of October 27, "They came marching in."

Treaty Camp would be defended at two front lines: on Highway 1806, where water protectors set up a barricade directly north of the camp, and on County Road 134, a dirt road that bisects the highway south of Treaty Camp and north of Oceti Sakowin Camp. Water protectors suspected police would use the dirt road to cut off access to the larger camp, where thousands of water protectors had stayed behind.

Desiree Kane, a Miwok freelance reporter who stayed at the resistance camps from May to December 2016, approached County Road 134 as the standoff with police began. Within hours, barricades were set ablaze in between the water protectors and the police.

Despite the flames, Kane said, "There was an overwhelming sense of calm." Singers sang prayer songs to the beat of a hand drum. On the hills, horse riders looked down on the gathering. "I think it's portrayed as mayhem, but that's not what I witnessed."

At Highway 1806, however, arguments had broken out about whether to allow police to extinguish a barricade fire that was sending smoke billowing into the hills. Horinek backed away from his cry of "No surrender; no retreat." Despite objections, he pushed people back, allowing police to inch forward. "I think had we not slowly pulled back that there would have been loss of life on October 27, 2016," he said.

Soon, law enforcement began deploying pepper spray, Tasers, rubber bullets, sound cannons, and batons against water protectors.

Frank Archambault, a Standing Rock tribal member and member of a camp security group, found himself pleading with water protectors to avoid provoking police. "We're all the time trying to stop them from throwing stuff, so they don't have an excuse to shoot those people," he said.

TigerSwan, a firm made up of former military personnel hired by Energy Transfer Partners to manage its sprawling security operation, organized the daily briefings and made sure police knew what was being discussed. Public records show that Mercer County Sheriff Dean Danzeisen and Morton County Sheriff's Deputy Lynn Wanner received the presentations.

A spokesperson for Morton County said that they only used the information from briefings for "situational awareness." Mercer County did not respond to requests for comment. TigerSwan and Energy Transfer Partners did not respond either.

In an interview with The Intercept, Kirchmeier insisted that law enforcement kept private security at a distance. "When we did a law enforcement function or we had a law enforcement incident, I did not want the private security anywhere near where the law enforcement was," he said. "Could they stay up on the hilltops and that type of thing? Yes, because it was on Dakota Access property."

But he admitted that law enforcement and DAPL security did sometimes work together, "depending on the circumstance."

"Did we talk to private security? Absolutely. We used them as a resource just like many other resources that are out there," he said, listing asset sharing that included police using private security's snow mobiles and ATVs for their operations.

A spokesperson for the Morton County Sheriff's Department confirmed that the two men (shown in law enforcement video footage in the brown coat and the camouflage bandana) helping handcuff Beaulieu and her companion were DAPL security officers.

"Security was not arresting - they do not have the authority to do so - they are only helping with detaining the unlawful protesters," the spokesperson wrote in an email to The Intercept. The spokesperson added that it was "not any different than if an intruder was on your private property - you have every right to try to hold them, detain them, as the police arrive to arrest them."

Meanwhile, on Highway 1806, police were breaking up various ceremonies in the midst of the standoff. They separated and arrested a huddle of elders immersed in prayer. Joseph Hock, of the Mackinac tribe from Michigan, was pulled out of a sweat lodge. "I was sort of a little fuzzy-headed by then," he said. "It was like jumping in ice-cold water in the middle of winter, that's what it felt like."

In the distance, smoke billowed, as a bulldozer was set on fire in an area off 1806 where DAPL stored its equipment. The group blocking County Road 134 had retreated.

Still, there was defiance in the faces of many, even as it became clear the camp had fallen. "Regardless if we come out of this whole thing heroes or not, we were fighting for our people that day; we were fighting for our land," Renville said. "We felt like we were winning."

In the hills, three water protectors on horseback put into action a plan formulated by Lizama and his crew in the first days of Treaty Camp: They drove a herd of buffalo from an area ranch toward the frontline. As police moved farther and farther south, the buffalo stampeded in the background. "This is the epitome of Indian Country - what it's like to be here. We're in a modern-day Indian war," Renville said. "When it comes to these attacks on the environment, these treaty laws are the only thing that can save us because they're the supreme law of the land."

The man at the wheel of the white truck was Kyle Thompson, a guard for Leighton security, one of about half a dozen private security companies working to guard the pipeline. Although Thompson was ex-military, Leighton mostly hired off-duty cops, including, said company president Kevin Mayberry, officers from the Morton County Sheriff's Department and other local agencies. Morton County told The Intercept that Leighton had requested personnel to watch an equipment yard. "The sheriff made the deputies aware of the job opportunity to serve as private security in their off hours (essentially, a second job - they were paid by Leighton). It was only for 12 days from Aug. 5-17 because once the protest began, the deputies were needed to respond to that activity and worked plenty of overtime with that," said a spokesperson.

For the water protectors, private security had been a constant presence since August. Scouts like Lizama encountered them dressed in ghillie suits, which are used by the military to disguise soldiers as piles of grass, hiding in the countryside at night. They followed drivers around. Rumors of security infiltrating the camps - later proven to be founded - had circulated for weeks.

The sudden appearance on October 27 of an armed private security officer was the manifestation of a threat they had always felt was lurking.

In an interview with The Intercept, Thompson said he drove toward the camp responding to a message that equipment was on fire near Highway 1806.

He said that as he approached the side road where the burning construction equipment was located, wearing a red bandana to disguise himself as a water protector, he saw a crowd of people. "I got super paranoid and nervous. I was security, and in a sense behind the lines," Thompson said. Sitting next to him was his AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

Mayberry said that his company largely stayed away from protesters and did not deploy disguised guards. "We had no guards doing that, so if he was doing that, or if somebody was doing that, that's on him; that has nothing to do with our company," he said, adding that non-law enforcement were not supposed to be armed. "We didn't even know he had a gun with him," he said.

Water protectors noticed the unfamiliar truck and asked Thompson who he was. "Brian," he lied.

But the water protectors didn't miss his rifle.

"They were like, stop that truck. If they stopped me and got into it, I realize they would have known who I was. I don't know what they would have done," Thompson recalled. So he sped down the road, steering into the ditch to avoid pedestrians. As he drove, people attempted to block his path.

"The suicide by law enforcement thing popped back into my head," Thompson said later, recalling a warning he said he'd heard in one of the daily security briefings. "These people are almost willing to get run over."

"If he would have shot those rounds off, the police would have killed us," said Horinek. As was the case with many other water protectors, his thoughts immediately went to Wounded Knee, when a single shot fired as the U.S. 7th Cavalry descended on an encampment of Lakota people sparked a massacre.

As Thompson's white truck neared the Oceti Sakowin camp, Fasig veered left, ramming Thompson to a halt. Thompson emerged from the vehicle holding his AR-15, finger on the trigger. The crowd screamed at him to put down the gun. He backed into the pond on the side of the road as water protectors, one armed with a knife, surrounded him and attempted to disarm him. Pipeline opponents set his truck on fire.

While Thompson was eventually disarmed and arrested by officers with the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he was never charged. Instead, it would be Fasig and two others who tried to disarm Thompson who would face felony charges.

To Fasig, the outcome seemed twisted. "If you have an unknown person wearing a mask with an AR-15 that took the license plates off his truck, and he's going through a ditch and driving around people in an aggressive manner, trying to get close to your schools and your churches - if the citizens in that city take and do everything they can to stop that man, that city would have a parade," he said. "But when it comes to employees of Dakota Access doing anything like that toward Native Americans, we all of a sudden become criminals."

Many of the 142 people arrested at Treaty Camp that day told The Intercept that they were held on the highway in handcuffs for hours, stripped of their clothes, and had identification numbers written on their arms.

Eventually, they were loaded onto school buses, some barefoot and in their underwear, and taken to Morton County, where they were packed into dog kennels before being shipped to jails across the state, including some several hours away, without being told where they were going. Upon release, many returned to find that their cars had been impounded and their tents and property dumped on a pile on the ground.

Hock, who was pulled out of the sweat lodge, said he returned to find his belongings, including a sacred pipe, had been urinated on.

"They wanted to degrade and humiliate us so that we would turn back and go home," he told The Intercept. "But what they actually did added to the resolve to go ahead and stand up and fight even more."

The spokesperson for the Morton County Sheriff's Department confirmed that "fenced cubicles" were used on that day but stressed that "all essential services" were provided to those temporarily held in them. She added that "the inmates had the number written on their arms so it couldn't be easily removed," as had happened on previous occasions, and noted that those arrested were only allowed to keep one layer of clothes for safety reasons. "If they didn't want that layer to be their long underwear, they had the option of going to the restroom to remove the underwear and change into their pants," the spokesperson wrote.

She also confirmed that those arrested were not told where they were being taken to in order to avoid "the potential for the bus being stopped and surrounded on the highway by a mass of people, or a mass of people gathering at the destination attempting to disrupt the process and creating a dangerous situation."

"The private security company working for the landowner likely knows what was done with property left behind," the spokesperson added, noting that as those arrested were trespassing, the property owners had no obligation to return their belongings. "If there was property urinated upon, it was not done by law enforcement."

In all, over the course of seven months, 838 people faced charges in at least 427 separate DAPL-related criminal cases in North Dakota, according to the Water Protector Legal Collective, a group of lawyers representing many of those defendants. As of late September, 427 people's cases remained open, 289 were dismissed, 105 resolved through plea deals or other pretrial diversions, and 10 resulted in convictions. Two more people were convicted and imprisoned last week - the first to receive a jail sentence in connection to last year's protests.

The most serious charges involve incidents that took place on October 27.

Five people accused of helping set the County Road 134 bridge on fire - as well as one person accused of setting a Highway 1806 barricade ablaze - were charged with "commission of a civil disorder" and "using fire to commit a civil disorder," federal charges that carry a mandatory minimum sentence of 10 years in prison. And a woman named Red Fawn Fallis faces three federal felony charges - after a gun went off when officers tackled her to the ground on the day of the Treaty Camp raid. She faces the possibility of life in prison.

"A lot of people thought that it was over after Standing Rock, and they didn't think how this is years long. We have cases scheduled out through July," said Timothy Cominghay, a member of Freshet - a native collective that's been providing support to those returning to North Dakota for their court dates. "This is just a different type of resistance."

Months after he drove his truck toward the Oceti Sakowin Camp, Thompson, the private security guard, emerged as an unlikely ally to those facing charges for attempting to disarm him.

"The water protectors that day, they had a mission to protect their own people," Thompson told Myron Dewey, a water protector and journalist with Digital Smoke Signals, in a Facebook Live interview on July 12. "It was just a miscommunication on both sides, I believe, that made us do what we did."

Following that interview, a state prosecutor dropped charges against Brennon Nastacio, one of the water protectors that had attempted to disarm Thompson in the water, saying that Thompson's statements had raised "significant doubt as to whether the state could meet its burden of proof with regard to the charge of terrorizing." According to an agreement with the court, Fasig and Hernandez will see their charges dismissed in a year if they pay fines and commit no crimes.

"I'm ready for this all to be over with. But I also want to help and get the truth out there. The charges people are facing are a little bit extreme for what they did," Thompson told The Intercept. "I feel like I have people who don't like me on both sides now. I feel like a lot of protectors that don't like me. A lot of law enforcement that don't like me."

Most water protectors and police have doubled down on their resolve - and new pipeline fights have picked up across the country.

"There is a lot of interest throughout the country on what happened and how we handled it, what we learned, and those type of issues," Sheriff Kirchmeier told The Intercept. "I have been around, went to several other states and talking to emergency managers, to other sheriffs, to those individuals who are interested in it. The main interest is trying to find out a little bit about the background, the history of it, and what we could do, and what we did do for the safety of everybody involved."

Joye Braun is preparing for the next treaty stand. The newly revived Keystone XL Pipeline would swing just outside the boundary of her Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation and awaits a major decision from Nebraska.

"There won't be another Standing Rock, just like there won't be a Wounded Knee '73," she said. "But we learned a lot of lessons."

If the Keystone XL Pipeline begins construction, Braun will pitch a teepee at another frontline camp.

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Law Enforcement Descended On Standing Rock A Year Ago And Changed the DAPL Fight Forever

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One year ago today, on October 27, 2016, hundreds of law enforcement officers descended on a small resistance camp that stood directly in the path of the Dakota Access Pipeline, forcibly evicting residents and arresting 142 people - more than on any other day in the 11-month-long Standing Rock struggle.

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by Jordan T. Camp and Christina Heatherton
Ebook currently available for free.

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Verso Books is the largest independent, radical publishing house in the English-speaking world.

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Undisclosed: The Killing of Freddie Gray

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Undisclosed: The Killing of Freddie Gray

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Full season

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Abolish the Police. Instead, Let’s Have Full Social, Economic, and Political Equality.

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Abolish the Police. Instead, Let’s Have Full Social, Economic, and Political Equality.

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The Nation
by Mychal Denzel Smith (his book is listed under nonfiction books)

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A few weeks ago, there was a shooting at my apartment building. A total of five shots were fired resulting in, thankfully, zero injuries. I was home when it happened, but live on the third floor, away from the shooter's target. The kids downstairs, who hang out in the hallway pretty much everyday, drinking, smoking, talking shit, and selling weed, had some of their beef meet them at home. That night, I remember hearing one of them scream, "They shot me bro!"-though it seems it was probably the shock of the gunshots plus the shattering of glass from the building's front door that made him believe he was hit. It was frightening.

However, more frightening than that is the fact that nearly every night since the shooting there has either been a police car, parked across the street with its lights flashing, or two cops posted outside my building, right at the steps, standing guard. This is supposed to be the measure that prevents further violence, but the presence of the police scares me more than the kids selling drugs or the gunshots ever did.

One day, while walking into my building, avoiding all eye contact with the two officers, I heard one of them say to other "Wanna do a vertical?" as I put my keys in the front door. A vertical is when police enter a building and go from top to bottom, scoping the place out for any potential criminal activity. I remember that these are the circumstances under which Akai Gurley was killed.

Another night, I was walking to the bodega to buy some ice cream, and as soon as I hit the bottom of the steps, still needing to walk down the hallway to get to the front door, the officers eyes were fixed on me, and they didn't let up until I was blocks away. I feel incredibly lucky, especially days later when video surfaced of Walter Scott being shot in the back as he ran away from Officer Michael Slager in South Carolina.

Slager originally stopped Scott for driving with a broken taillight. Scott ran away, possibly fearing he would be arrested for owing back child support, and Slager chased after him. The video doesn't show when the taser was drawn, but this interaction escalated to Slager using his taser on Scott, who managed to get away, at which point Slager drew his gun and shot at Scott eight times, hitting him with five shots. Were it not for the video taken by a local bystander, Slager's account of the shooting-that Scott took the taser and because Slager feared for his life he had no other choice but to shoot him-would be the only account available. Now Slager has been fired and charged with murder.

That's it, right? That's what the movement was about? This is what justice looks like, correct? We've learned the mistakes from Darren Wilson killing Michael Brown, and Daniel Pantaleo killing Eric Garner, yeah? We're going to start holding the police accountable.

I've said this before: there is no justice where there are dead black people. I'll continue saying it, because if we're satisfied with charges and potential prison time, we've missed the entire point of #BlackLivesMatter. This isn't about getting "better" police, ones who exercise discretion in using force, but getting away from "needing" police altogether.

In 1966, James Baldwin wrote for The Nation: "...the police are simply the hired enemies of this population. They are present to keep the Negro in his place and to protect white business interests, and they have no other function." This remains as true today as it was in 1966, only now we have bought into the myth of police "serving and protecting" wholesale. What do you do with an institution whose core function is the control and elimination of black people specifically, and people of color and the poor more broadly?

You abolish it. In 1964, Malcolm X told the students of Oxford Union: "You're living at a time of extremism, a time of revolution, a time when there's got to be a change. People in power have misused it and now there has to be change and a better world has to be built. And the only way it's going to be built is with extreme methods." Abolishing the police is an extreme measure, but as a measure of justice, it should be our ultimate goal.

We don't consider the abolition of police a viable position to take because we believe they're the only thing standing between upstanding citizens and the violence of the deranged. We're afraid of being attacked on the street, of having our homes shot at, and being left without access to equally violent retribution. But does this mean we want police, or safety and security? Safety and security are ideas, ones that may never be fully achieved, and the police are an institution that have proved themselves capable of only providing the illusion of safety and security to a select few. The bulk of their jobs has nothing to do with violence prevention. They spend most of their time doing things like Slager did in his initial contact with Scott-stopping people for broken taillights. Writing for Gawker, David Graeber of the London School of Economics says:

The police spend very little of their time dealing with violent criminals-indeed, police sociologists report that only about 10% of the average police officer's time is devoted to criminal matters of any kind. Most of the remaining 90% is spent dealing with infractions of various administrative codes and regulations: all those rules about how and where one can eat, drink, smoke, sell, sit, walk, and drive. If two people punch each other, or even draw a knife on each other, police are unlikely to get involved. Drive down the street in a car without license plates, on the other hand, and the authorities will show up instantly, threatening all sorts of dire consequences if you don't do exactly what they tell you.

The police, then, are essentially just bureaucrats with weapons. Their main role in society is to bring the threat of physical force-even, death-into situations where it would never have been otherwise invoked, such as the enforcement of civic ordinances about the sale of untaxed cigarettes.

Ninety percent of an officer's time isn't devoted to our safety, but rather to things we may find annoying (or in the case of things like untaxed cigarettes, create a black market for goods that threaten the profits of businesses), inserting the potential for violence where there is cause for none. And when it comes to preventing heinous acts of violence (or holding the perpetrators accountable) that should be condemned by all, like domestic violence and sexual assault, the police are largely ineffectual. The police are not performing the function we say they are, and there are real ways to achieve a world with less violence that don't include the police. We simply haven't tried. Until we invest in full employment, universal healthcare that includes mental health services, free education at every level, comprehensive sex education that teaches about consent and bodily autonomy, the decriminalization of drugs and erasure of the stigma around drug use, affordable and adequate housing, eliminating homophobia and transphobia-things that actually reduce the amount of violence we witness-I don't want to hear about how necessary the police are. They are only necessary because we are all too willing to hide behind our cowardice and not actually put forth the effort to create a better world. It's too extreme.

When I say, "abolish the police," I'm usually asked what I would have us replace them with. My answer is always full social, economic, and political equality, but that's not what's actually being asked. What people mean is "who is going to protect us?" Who protects us now? If you're white and well-off, perhaps the police protect you. The rest of us, not so much. What use do I have for an institution that routinely kills people who look like me, and make it so I'm afraid to walk out of my home?

My honest answer is that I don't know what a world without police looks like. I only know there will be less dead black people. I know that a world without police is a world with one less institution dedicated to the maintenance of white supremacy and inequality. It's a world worth imagining.

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Abolish the Police. Instead, Let's Have Full Social, Economic, and Political Equality.

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A few weeks ago, there was a shooting at my apartment building. A total of five shots were fired resulting in, thankfully, zero injuries. I was home when it happened, but live on the third floor, away from the shooter's target.

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Video - Panel Discussion

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The New York Times Presents The #1619Project

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Disband, Disempower, Disarm: Amplifying the Theory and Practice of Police Abolition

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Disband, Disempower, Disarm: Amplifying the Theory and Practice of Police Abolition

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Critical Criminology

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McDowell and Fernandez - 2018 - ‘Disband, Disempower, and Disarm’ Amplifying the .pdf

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A Strategy and Study Guide

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"The Black Power Mixtape" Clip with Angela Davis

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"The Black Power Mixtape" Clip with Angela Davis

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PBS, 13 minutes

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Independent Lens | The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975: Angela Davis | Season 13

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Independent Lens Clip: Season 13 | 13m 5s From 1967 to 1975, Swedish interest in the U.S. civil rights movement peaked. Swedish filmmakers documented the Black Power movement, which was either ignored or portrayed as terrorism by U.S. media. This Community Classroom module analyzes Angela Davis and her profound impact on global liberation movements.

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Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution

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Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution

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In the turbulent 1960s, change was coming to America and the fault lines could no longer be ignored - cities were burning, Vietnam was exploding, and disputes raged over equality and civil rights. A new revolutionary culture was emerging and it sought to drastically transform the system. The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense would, for a short time, put itself at the vanguard of that change. The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution is the first feature-length documentary to explore the Black Panther Party, its significance to the broader American culture, its cultural and political awakening for black people, and the painful lessons wrought when a movement derails. MORE

Master documentarian Stanley Nelson goes straight to the source, weaving a treasure trove of rare archival footage with the diverse group of voices of the people who were there: police, FBI informants, journalists, white supporters and detractors, and Black Panthers who remained loyal to the party and those who left it.

Featuring Kathleen Cleaver, Jamal Joseph, Ericka Huggins, and dozens of others, as well as archival footage of the late Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution tells the story of a pivotal movement that gave rise to a new revolutionary culture in America. Their causes, with slogans like "power to the people" and "creating a better world" are relevant again in an era that has seen the rise of the "Black Lives Matter" movement and tense relations between African American communities and the police. The Black Panthers condemnations of injustice, oppression and brutality in the late '60s and early '70s reverberate again in one city after another.

Stanley Nelson is an Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, MacArthur "Genius" Fellow, and member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in August 2014. Nelson has directed and produced numerous acclaimed films, including Freedom Summer, Freedom Riders, Jonestown: The Life and Death of Peoples Temple and The Murder of Emmett Till . He is also co-founder and executive director of Firelight Media, which provides support to emerging documentarians. Currently in production is Tell Them We Are Rising: The Story of Historically Black Colleges and Universities , the second in a series of three films Nelson will direct as part of a new multiplatform PBS series entitled America Revisited . LESS

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The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution | Documentary about Black Panther Party | Independent Lens | PBS

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In the turbulent 1960s, change was coming to America and the fault lines could no longer be ignored - cities were burning, Vietnam was exploding, and disputes raged over equality and civil rights. A new revolutionary culture was emerging and it sought to drastically transform the system.

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What the George Floyd Protests Reveal About Policing

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What the George Floyd Protests Reveal About Policing

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Protests erupt against police brutality and use of force. In many cities, police are responding with even more force. We look at why it's happening and what it means about policing in America.

Jeh Johnson, partner in the litigation department at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. Former secretary for the Department of Homeland Security. (@PaulWeissLLP)

Jamiles Lartey, staff writer for the Marshall Project. (@Jamiles)

Edward Maguire, professor of criminology and criminal justice at Arizona State University. (@ERMaguire)

Jane Castor, mayor of Tampa, Florida. Former Tampa chief of police. (@JaneCastor)

Marshall Project: " Before George Floyd's Death, Minneapolis Police Failed to Adopt Reforms, Remove Bad Officers" - "As video footage of George Floyd's last moments circulated this week, many watched in shock and revulsion. The 46-year old black man died Monday, pleading for air, as a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck during an arrest."

New York Times: " Protesters Dispersed With Tear Gas So Trump Could Pose at Church" - " People who gathered outside the White House to protest police brutality spent Monday waving signs and screaming for justice. They watched as police officers and National Guard units flooded Lafayette Square, delivering on a threat made by President Trump."

CNN: " As rage over killings of black Americans sweeps nation, DOJ has all but abandoned broad police investigations" - "During the Obama administration, high-profile police shootings of black men like Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Laquan McDonald in Chicago helped spark sweeping federal investigations and reforms of biased policing practices."

Al Jazeera: " Mapping US police killings of Black Americans" - "Between 2013 and 2019, police in the United States killed 7,666 people, according to data compiled by Mapping Police Violence, a research and advocacy group. On May 25, 2020 at 9:25pm (02:25 GMT, May 26), George Floyd, a 46-year-old resident of Minnesota, became yet another victim of police brutality as he was killed in police custody while unarmed."

ABC News: " Why some police officers stood with protesters outraged over George Floyd's death" - "As images of police officers in riot gear clashing with protesters in response to the death of George Floyd proliferated from across the country, a very different theme emerged from several cities."

Vox: " Violent protests are not the story. Police violence is." - "The protests over George Floyd's killing by a white police officer have spread from Minneapolis across the country, revealing the pent-up anger over institutional racism nationwide."

Buzzfeed News: " There's One Big Reason Why Police Brutality Is So Common In The US. And That's The Police Unions." - "More than a year before a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin, pinned George Floyd to the ground in a knee chokehold, Mayor Jacob Frey banned "warrior" training for the city's police force."

Houston Chronicle: " Editorial: Houston police have killed 6 men. We need to see the videos, Chief Acevedo" - "Being black in America should not be a death sentence."

Washington Post: " Police turn more aggressive against protesters and bystanders alike, adding to disorder" - "Federal authorities urged local officials Sunday to crack down harder on rioters after American cities were rocked by fiery spasms of violence and vandalism, part of a nationwide wave of protests over police misconduct."

The Guardian: " Policing in the US is not about enforcing law. It's about enforcing white supremacy" - "On Friday the CNN journalist Omar Jimenez was arrested on live television as he covered protests of police brutality in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Jimenez identifies as African American and Hispanic, and when the cops confronted him, he did just what minority parents tell their kids to do. Jimenez cooperated; he was respectful, deferential even."

Nieman Lab: " U.S. police have attacked journalists at least 100 times in the past four days" - "As Black Lives Matter protests spread across the country one week after a white police officer allegedly murdered a black man, George Floyd, it's becoming clear that attacks by police on journalists are becoming a widespread pattern, not one-off incidents."

Marshall Project: " Why So Many Police Are Handling the Protests Wrong" - "Last Wednesday, Marcell Harris was hit by a rubber bullet. He had joined the second day of protests in this city over the killing of George Floyd, a black man who died after a police officer kneeled on his neck for more than eight minutes while bystanders filmed."

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What The George Floyd Protests Reveal About Policing In The U.S.

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Protests erupt against police brutality and use of force. In many cities, police are responding with even more force. We look at why it's happening and what it means about policing in America. Jeh Johnson , partner in the litigation department at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP.

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The Police Can't Solve the Problem, the Police Are the Problem

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The Police Can't Solve the Problem, the Police Are the Problem

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New York Times Op Ed

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Twenty-five years after the infamous 1994 crime bill, too many criminal justice groups are simply reimagining mass incarceration.

By Derecka Purnell and

Ms. Purnell and Ms. Stahly-Butts are lawyers.

Credit... Sally Deng

A quarter-century on, criminal justice advocates agree that the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed by Bill Clinton in September 1994, was a disaster for poor people and people of color, and a driver of mass incarceration. Elected officials, policy experts and academics have recently sought to undo this damage by reimagining public safety. But too many of them are keeping law enforcement central to their vision for reform. This is a fundamental mistake.They are not reimagining public safety. They are reimagining mass incarceration.

The reality is this: The police fill prisons. We can't repair the harm that the 1994 crime bill has done by promoting mass incarceration without reducing the size and scope of the police.

The crime bill articulated an obsession with punishment and prescribed policing as the cure to a host of social ills. It provided funding for 100,000 new police officers, $14 billion in grants for community-oriented policing, $9.7 billion for prisons and $6.1 billion crime prevention programs. The legislation was partly responsible for a 30 percent increase in police officers from 699,000 in 1990 to 899,000 in 1999, and funded over 7,000 school officers. Today, there are over one million law enforcement officers in the United States

But did the plan work? The Government Accountability Office concluded that while there was a 26 percent decline in overall crime from 1993 to 2000, only 1.3 percent of the decline could be attributed to additional police officers. The majority of that decrease, the office said, came from other, unspecified factors; smaller studies have found that everything from preschool to job programs for young people decreases crime rates.

Approximately 1 0.5 million people are arrested each year in this country. While a majority of these arrests ultimately result in dismissed charges, their impact is devastating. Being arrested, whatever the outcome, can jeopardize a person's employment, housing, physical and mental health and parental rights.

Politicians promise jail closings even as they increase police budgets - and, as a result, arrests. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York has acknowledged that the 1994 crime bill was a mistake and wants the city's Rikers Island jail to close by 2026. Yet New York's transportation agency just announced a plan to hire 500 police officers to combat fare evasion and manage homeless people in the subway.

Free public transportation, living wages and quality housing would be better responses to these issues than increased policing. Nationwide, nearly half of the people whom the police arrest multiple times have incomes below $10,000 a year. It's important to put this in historical perspective: Since it originated with efforts to prevent labor organizing and to patrol slaves, modern policing has punished the poor. No number of diversity workshops, body cameras and community policing initiatives will change that.

Reformers on both sides of the aisle praised President Trump for signing the First Step Act last year as a measure toward ending mass incarceration. The act is a modest, underfunded criminal justice reform package that a coalition of over 150 black led organizations opposed. Last week, White House economists announced a plan to use the police to get homeless people "off the street." This direction is misguided. Police officers cannot solve underlying causes of homelessness or other social problems. They can only temporarily manage these issues with punishment and more violence.

And even more misguided ideas are being proposed. After a movement against police violence erupted in 2014, scholars, nonprofit groups and politicians reimaginedpolice officers as youth mentors, mental health professionals, and social workers - against the wishes of many police officers. But the police do not help vulnerable populations - they make populations vulnerable. Excessive force is the No. 1 investigated complaint against police officers, and sexual violence is the second. People with mental illness are 16 times more likely to be killed by the police. People of color, people with disabilities, immigrants, queer and trans people, those with mental illness and the homeless disproportionately experience violence from officers, who kill an average of nearly 1,000 people annually, and sexually assault, physically assault, harass, and surveil hundreds of thousands more

Philanthropists and politicians have called for more "community policing," the idea of having police departments develop partnerships with community groups to ease tensions between law enforcement and residents. In the last 10 years, the Department of Justice included "community policing" in its consent decrees with police departments accused of misconduct in Baltimore, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Chicago, New Orleans, Newark, Puerto Rico and Ferguson, Mo., and Oakland, Calif.

But community policing is an empty phrase. A Washington Post report showed that law enforcement use of force increased in half of police departments with consent decrees. Asking police officers to strengthen community relationships - including by doing things like playing football with children or handing out ice cream - does not reduce their power to harm anyone.

There's hope. Community organizations are working to solve the problems our communities face without putting them in more danger. The San Francisco school board recently passed a resolution limiting the role of the police on school campuses, acknowledging that law enforcement's presence criminalizes students under the guise of protection. The Oakland Power Projects trains community members in health skills and emergency response practices to reduce reliance on the police and to create the support networks needed to address the issues that cause problems in the first place.

In New York, the Audre Lorde Project's Safe Outside the System produces resources for L.B.G.T.Q. communities to build safe spaces without police involvement. Nationally, the People's Coalition for Safety and Freedom is organizing for the repeal of the 1994 crime bill and for a community-driven process to decide how to respond to community-based violence and corporate harm.

Systems of oppression, like slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration, must be reduced and abolished - not reimagined. Police officers, who primarily put people in cages, are the enforcers of mass incarceration. We must reckon with the reality that the police are part of the problem and stop investing money, power and legitimacy in them.

Derecka Purnell (@DereckaPurnell) is a human rights lawyer. Marbre Stahly-Butts is the executive director of the Law for Black Lives network of lawyers.
The Times is committed to publishing Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | The Police Can't Solve the Problem. They Are the Problem.

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Twenty-five years after the infamous 1994 crime bill, too many criminal justice groups are simply reimagining mass incarceration. By Derecka Purnell and Ms. Purnell and Ms. Stahly-Butts are lawyers. A quarter-century on, criminal justice advocates agree that the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, signed by Bill Clinton in September 1994, was a disaster for poor people and people of color, and a driver of mass incarceration.

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Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror: The Police Shooting of Loreal Tsingine

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Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror: The Police Shooting of Loreal Tsingine

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Academic research

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Ghosts are the things we try to bury, but that refuse to stay buried. They are our fears and our horrors, disembodied, but made inescapable by their very bodilessness. Ghostly Indians present us with the possibility of vanishing ourselves, being swallowed up into another's discourses, another's imagination. When ghostly Indian figures haunt the white American imagination, they serve as constant reminders of the fragility of national identity. ( 2000, 5)

Part One

Policing as Indian Fighting

It is useful to think of policing as racial infrastructure, that is, a part of the material systems that organise primitive accumulation and the racial hierarchy on which it depends. In this sense, colonial policing is state organised Indian fighting. In keeping with Yazzie's reminder that police in towns such as Winslow assist white settlers to contain the Indian threat (Yazzie 2014), we can consider policing in Winslow as a part of the infrastructural ground on which settlers' quest both for coherence and land are played out. What first marks the scene of the shooting as a fully colonial and racial encounter is the familiar signpost of colonial policing, namely that it is organised around maintaining the racial lines of force of the settler town. Patrolling the streets of the settler town, as I have shown elsewhere (Razack 2015), maintains public space for white inhabitants, producing Indigenous people as permanently out of place, herded, hunted, evicted, and marked for slow death. The police, it should be remembered, knew that they were looking for an "Indian woman shoplifter on a beer run" the category announced over the police radio and one that Shipley revealed as a part of his everyday lexicon when he unselfconsciously categorised Tsingine as "killing me for a beer run" (12). If we take Shipley at his word, that he felt a fear and a threat from a small, defiant young woman with a blunt pair of small scissors for a weapon, and put into context his repeated encounters with Indians, several of which seemed to be marked by the defiance of Indigenous youth, we can note the infrastructure of policing in which such scenarios of imperiled white masculinity are played out. The streets and the prison are two sites where the contours of the racial order are written on the bodies of Indigenous women and men, and in specific ways, on the bodies of Indigenous children and youth. In a reservation border town (a town that is adjacent to a reservation and not to the actual border) such as Winslow, Arizona, policing, barely altered from its nineteenth century form, has as its primary objective, the disciplining and surveillance of Indians, and their eviction from the settler town. Shipley's daily life as a police officer reveals as much, and the making of settler spaces through violence against Indigenous people confirms the systematised features of his activities and its connection to primitive accumulation on Indigenous land.

The ongoing theft of land and the racial terror that accompanies it are easily traced for Winslow and surrounding areas. In Wasi'chu: The Continuing Indian Wars, Bruce Johansen and Roberto Maestas ( 1979) write of "the theft of life, land and resources from America's first inhabitants" (18). They recount in detail the institutional, cultural and physical violence directed against the Navajo people over centuries. Wasi'chu, explained in the foreword by John Redhouse as a Lakota word for "greedy one who takes the fat," (Redhouse 1979, 11) carefully documents the acres of land stolen by white settlers, and intensified resource extraction on Indian land of the late 1970s when coal and uranium formed the basis of an energy policy that required an even more vigorous pursuit of Indian land than in earlier decades. Putting the American Indian Movement (AIM) of the 1960s and 1970s in this context, Redhouse introduces the book's equally carefully mapping of the persecution of Indian leaders and activists and an escalating racial terror that accompanied what he called "a full scale anti-Indian movement" comprising agencies of the federal government as well as settlers (cited in Johansen and Maestas 1979, 13).

Between 1973 and 1974, the bodies of ten Navajo were discovered, among them the bodies of middle-aged men who were sexually mutilated and tortured. Three non-Indian juveniles were arrested for the crime, tried and sent to a juvenile reformatory for two years, the light sentence sparking an Indigenous protest movement. Describing the "mutilation murders" of the 1970s, Redhouse, then the associate director of the National Indian Youth Council of Albuquerque, New Mexico, notes that Indian activists understood clearly that the violence was not simply the acts of crazy kids but instead "part of a whole racist picture" (cited in Johansen and Maestas 1979, 62). The tapestry of racial violence Johansen and Maestas present in Wasi'chu, and that Redhouse references, includes the activities of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the justice system, the Public Health Service, the multinational energy companies, and everyday encounters with white settlers. Johansen and Maestas meticulously document the removal of Indian children from their families, the sterilisation of Indian women, the denigration of Indian children in the school system and the insidious effects of a colonial police force dedicated to targeting activists and sowing the seeds of internal discord on reservations. The mechanisms that by the middle 1970s enabled 63% of Indian owned agricultural land to be cultivated by non-Indians complete the "whole racist picture," (82) leaving little doubt about the full-on colonial project in operation and the tremendous racial violence required to sustain it. The epicenter of such patterns of accumulation by dispossession is the border town, those spaces marked by a sustained and violent encounter between white settlers and Indians.

The Border Town: A Place Where You Can "Get Away With Anything" Against Indians

Reminding us to attend to the materiality of colonialism, Daniel Nemser ( 2017) observes that "infrastructure can serve not only as a signal of identity or belonging ... but also as a condition of possibility for the emergence of groupness as such, engendering social relations and structures of feeling"(17). Along these lines, "the things on which the process depends" such as railroad lines, roads, surveys, museums, fences and so on, are the foundation for rule and racialisation (18). The reservation border town, a product of the confinement of Indigenous peoples to reservations, offers a clear example of the racial infrastructure on which settler colonialism rests and the racial "groupness" that it requires and sustains. Diné historian Jennifer Nez Denetdale ( 2016), examining the historical and lived experiences of Indigenous people in towns that border the Navajo Nation (including the town of Winslow) and the tremendous racial violence reported to the Navajo Human Rights Commission, traces the emergence of reservation border towns as white settler centers that profited off Indian trade, and, early on, from ever expanding alcohol sales to Indians coming into town to purchase supplies. When continuous erosion of the Navajo land base drove many Indians off the reservation to seek work in the settler town, as a 1953 survey of reservation border towns confirmed, Indians began to settle in the settler town enduring the most abject conditions. Not surprisingly, alcohol abuse, homelessness and deep poverty continue to plague Indians in border towns and Indians remain confined to the edges and most marginal spaces of the settler town (Denetdale 2016). Then as now, the spatial arrangements of settler colonialism, arrangements that emerged with land dispossession and that Cheryl RedHorse Bennett ( 2018) describes as "predatory," generate and require considerable racial violence (24). Lisa Donaldson ( 2006) has shown, for instance, that the practice of 'Indian Rolling', racially motivated assaults committed by white youth against Indians in Farmington, a border town, is a rite of passage for white youth, and a practice with deep historical roots. Donaldson suggests that this degree of racial violence (which she terms hate crime) results from the situation where whites have total economic and political power over Indians. Along the same lines, Barbara Perry ( 2008) has explored the extent of hate crime in reservation border towns, noting their connection to settler colonialism and to an ongoing genocide, an argument also supported by Cheryl Redhorse Bennett's ( 2010) PhD dissertation on hate crimes in Farmington. As Perry ( 2009, 401) notes:

The very motive and intent of racialised violence is to protect carefully crafted boundaries, in the physical and social sense. It is a purposive process of policing the line between white/not white, between dominant and subordinate. It stands, then, as both punishment for those who dare to transgress, and those who are considering it.

Revealing for its generative features, namely its role in producing young white men as white and affirming settler power, Indian rolling is sufficiently practised as to have its own colloquial term, in much the same way as the term 'Starlight tours' is the label for the sometimes lethal Canadian police practice of driving Indigenous people outside of towns and leaving them to walk back into town in sub-zero temperatures, and often without shoes or coats (Razack 2015). Reservation border towns are places where an intense anti-Indian policing takes place, and where anti-Indigenous settler violence is considerable. Denetdale notes that anti-Indigenous violence in towns such as Winslow, Holbrook, Flagstaff and Page, Arizona, is nonetheless routinely attributed to the Navajo themselves and settlers are represented in law and society as the innocent and injured party.

Although research into border town violence is sparse, scholars and journalists have reported on the same features Denetdale and Donaldson describe, noting in particular that the gendered pattern of the violence has changed little for a century. Anti-Indigenous violence in border towns retains its early colonial character in that it is white men's violence (both police and settler) directed at Indigenous men and women alike. Writing one of the few in depth explorations of 'The Police Killings No One is Talking About', journalist Stephanie Woodard ( 2016) notes that police killings of Native Americans is greatest in border towns such as in New Mexico near the Navajo reservation, in South Dakota near Sioux reservations and in Montana near the Crow and Northern Cheyenne reservations. Woodard chronicles the range of police killings of Indigenous men and women, from the shooting of a Suquamish woman, Jeanetta Riley, pregnant, homeless and mentally ill, who threatened suicide and who was shot when she refused to drop the knife she held to herself, to Sarah Lee Circle Bear who died in her cell after telling her jailors that she was in excruciating pain. Commenting that the deaths she investigated "sound like tales from the pre-civil rights deep South," (Woodard 2016) Woodard draws a grim picture of Indigenous deaths in custody that often occur in border towns. Importantly, police violence has generated strong resistance from Native people. Woodard describes the Puyallup tribe's efforts to support a Washington State ballot initiative that seeks greater police accountability for lethal use of force. The Tribe's spokesperson whom Woodard interviewed, tribal elder Ramona Bennett, outlined the historical and gendered features of the violence and their connection to white men's sense of entitlement. Offering the example of railroad deaths a century ago, Tribal Elder Bennett explained the phenomenon:

Fishing and trapping were outlawed so the men went out at night, making the cabins very dangerous. White men would come, kick the doors in, rape and murder the [women] and throw their bodies on the railroad tracks, where they'd be called 'railroad accident deaths'. We discovered in our tribal enrollment office a stack of 'railroad death' documents from 1912 to 1917 (Woodard 2016).

Racial violence that emerges in the context of white claims for land and resources has remained constant up to the present. For instance, Traci Brynne Voyles ( 2015) charts how sexual violence against Indian women skyrocket with the influx of white miners in reservation border towns.

American Indian women also have the highest rate of violence perpetrated against them, as Sarah Deer has shown, violence that is both internal and external, the latter at rates higher than it is for other groups of women (Deer 2015). Framing the violence of white men towards Indian women as 'hate crime', Cheryl Redhorse Bennett ( 2018) notes that there has been little attention paid to the specific space of the reservation border town as a place where you can "get away with anything" against Indians (24). Confirming this conclusion, Amnesty International ( 2007) has reported widespread police harassment, and shootings and young white men regularly targeting Indigenous women in border towns. Although less reported and examined than it is in the Canadian Indigenous context, missing and murdered Indigenous women are also a phenomenon in the US. Alleen Brown ( 2018) describes the legal and political structures that inhibit investigations into Indigenous women who have disappeared. Farley et al. ( 2011) reporting on sex trafficking and Native women, document the tremendous violence that is aimed at Indigenous women in prostitution, a violence that Indigenous sex workers describe as specifically aimed at them as Indian women.

Although Native Americans account for 25% of Winslow's population, they averaged nearly 64% of arrests from 2012 to 2015, according to police filings (Newton 2017). Indigenous youth and women have a particular place in these statistics. If sexual violence from white men and police is not empirically validated for Winslow specifically, the Navajo community expresses tremendous fear for its girls and women when they venture into Winslow. (Indeed, one uncharitable commentator at a Navajo public forum at which I was present even blamed Tsingine for having gone to live in Winslow in the first place, knowing what the town is like for young Indian women, while another speculated that Tsingine might have been one of the women the police routinely take outside of the city to rape). Although it is hard in these informal conversations to confirm sexual violence and to delineate the role of the police from internal sexual violence, it is clear, as Shannon Speed ( 2016) has argued, that internal violence within Indigenous communities is linked to state violence in complex ways. Tsingine lived in Winslow and in that environment, she had a great deal of police contact, contact that sometimes occurred when she encountered sexual assaults from Indigenous and racialised men. Shipley, for example, was the police officer who responded to a call about domestic violence involving Tsingine, an event he claimed that he could not recall. He encountered a naked and evidently frightened Tsingine fleeing her abusive boyfriend, a man onlookers described as "Hispanic" (Rank Tribe 2017). Reading police reports of these events, one readily sees ongoing displacement and its consequences in Tsingine's life, the role of sexual violence and both Indigenous and police involvement in it. The violence in her life that came from all directions, and the sheer difficulty of surviving and thriving in a system premised on her destruction is evident in her short life. Her descent into drugs, for instance, her attempts to get help for mental illness, the sexual violence from Indigenous men, and her previous contacts with police all reveal the outlines of a life lived amidst considerable violence.

It is critical to consider the violence that is written on the Indigenous woman's body as a multiscalar imprinting of colonial power. In her analysis of Linda Hogan's novel Solar Storms, Mishuana Goeman ( 2017) emphasises that in order to understand the role of gender based violence in reproducing colonialism, it is essential that we consider the body as it journeys through temporalities and spaces. Hogan's protagonists are women whose individual bodies are linked to the social body of the Native community and the national bodies of the United States, Canada and Quebec. Thus extensive physical and sexual abuse at the hands of colonising men and the violence within their own communities that native women endure must be connected to the making of the settler collectivity, an unfolding of colonialism over time on land and on bodies. Interviewing Indigenous women asylum seekers in detention, Shannon Speed ( 2019) found confirmation that gang violence, drug violence, militarisation and state violence were all inextricably linked to intra familial violence ensuring that Indigenous women were consistently more likely than any other group of women to be victims of gender violence. Reporting that the US National Institute of Justice confirms that four out of five Native women experience violence in their lifetime and that 97% of these crimes are committed by non-Indians (Rosay 2018, cited in Speed 2019, 16), Speed emphasises we should not lose sight of the mutually constitutive nature of most gender violence. Domestic violence, for example, is in part generated by state violence ( 2019, 30).

White men are an important link in the chain of events that culminate in excessive violence in the lives of Indigenous women. The asymmetrical intimacies of the border town reveal that what we know as the excessive use of force by police towards Indigenous peoples is a daily gendered enactment of colonial power on the part of white men. The police files detailing Shipley's encounters with Indians, record the traces of the fear, memory and desire to which Bergland refers when she describes the colonial subject attempting to bury what cannot be buried. An organised and continuing dispossession unfolds in everyday and institutional extractive relationships between white men and women, and Indians, a dispossession in which policing has a central role to play. Institutionally sustained and integral to the extractive economy and spatial arrangements of settler colonialism, Shipley's use of force is important to the circuit of ongoing dispossession, assuaging colonial fears and anxieties, and, simultaneously, consolidating dispossession.

Part Two

The Official Story: Imperiled White Masculinity

The colonial underpinnings of Shipley's encounter with Loreal Tsingine are visible from the outset. If Tsingine arrived at the encounter already scripted as "an Indian on a beer run," (Jacobs 2014b, 118) Shipley came to it as a white man drawn to guns and to Indians. He enters the scene as a prototypical Indian fighter at risk from a wild Indian. At first glance, it is tempting to attribute Shipley's relationship to Indians to white extremism. Photographed at an earlier event wearing a t-shirt of the Three Percenters, a movement organised around patriotism and the idea of a constitutional right to bear arms, Shipley can be seen as someone whose allegiances are to what Kathleen Belew ( 2018) has described as the white power movement and paramilitary America. Belew is careful to note the expansive and contradictory category denoted by the term white power movement, a movement that brings together "members of the Klan, militias, radical tax resisters, white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and proponents of white theologies such as Christian identity, Odinism, and Dualism between 1975 and 1995" ( 2018, ix). She advises that not all members of this group advocate white nationalism and cannot be easily pinned to the right of the political spectrum. Importantly, Shipley, as an insightful reviewer of this article pointed out, does not have to be a member of white nationalist/right wing groups in order to fulfil the colonial role I am suggesting he plays. His allegiance to the Three Percenters merely confirms the colonial features of his character. One has only to reflect on the historical origins of the right to bear arms and the concomitant movement against big government to note the colonial underpinnings of such beliefs. As Dunbar-Ortiz ( 2018) has shown, the right to bear arms gave settlers the right to attack Indians and take their land. Settler insistence on the right to overthrow oppressive governments grew out of settler resistance to British authorities who sought to regulate the extent to which settlers could seize Indian land. The Three Percent movement insists that it is neither a militia nor white supremacist, merely nationalist. Yet, critics have pointed out that heavily armed three percenters have actively tried to infiltrate the US military and have provided armed security to white supremacist groups at rallies, including at the 2017 Charlottesville rally of white supremacist groups in which an anti-racist protester was killed. Although the group subsequently distanced itself from the rally and from related events, local affiliates are known to be involved in mosque bombings and other violent racial incidents (Sankin and Carless 2018). The Three Percenters have declared themselves solidly in favour of Donald Trump, and particularly so in the matter of stricter immigration controls and the building of a wall along the Mexico-US border. A land/race/arms nexus lies at the core of their white nationalism and there is little doubt that Shipley found himself comfortable with its chief tenets. If Shipley's affiliations announce his white supremacist leanings, it is also the case that his devotion to guns and his political position concerning protecting white America are foundational ideas in a settler society born of the dispossession of Indigenous populations. It is difficult to untangle the white extremist and white nationalist from an ordinary patriot and equally, to separate extremist anxieties and anger from the resentment that emanates from an ordinary white entitlement. Indeed, as Inderpal Grewal has argued in her discussion of mass shootings in America "the angry, white, Christian man who sees himself as dispossessed from his rightful place of power in the nation and exerting the sovereignty given to him by virtue of his gender and race," is now so familiar a figure that when mass murders occur, the killer is simply called a shooter, and not a killer, murderer or criminal (Grewal 2017, 185). Shipley, then, would seem to personify the unexceptional white subject for whom the Indian remains the archetype of all those (Black people, Brown people and racialised foreigners) who are imagined and experienced as a threat to white settler entitlement. Rather than extremist, the Indian fighter and the Indian fighter turned cop should be seen as foundational figures in the national imaginary, inhabiting and structuring the institution of policing among other places.

Shipley's record as a police officer offers glimpses of frustrated colonial desire and the violence it inspires, the figure Richard Slotkin describes as the subject for whom Indians lurk everywhere in society and in the recesses of one's own mind (Slotkin 1973, 564). Here one thinks of Shipley's service record, revealing his interest, if not obsession, in expressing power over Indigenous people, and Indigenous youth and girls in particular, groups that often refused to grant his authority. Equipped with extra guns, an illegal practice for which he was not sanctioned, Shipley could indulge himself with impunity in a twenty-first century version of Indian wars. Struggling to maintain his own coherence as colonial subject, fending off any intimacies that threaten colonial arrangements, Shipley can be seen to preserve coherence through violence. In his three years as a police officer, Shipley's service record hints at a volatility that easily led to an undue use of force particularly directed at young Indigenous people in whom he seemed to have inspired neither fear nor respect, responses that appear to have enraged him. As journalists reported, Shipley was first disciplined when the mother of a 15-year-old girl, complained that Shipley "slammed her daughter against a squad car and made a 'rude, ugly comment...'" (Farzan 2017). The girl apparently taunted Shipley by referring to him as a rookie. Shipley acknowledged responding harshly and was suspended, but the Department did not find evidence of excessive force. In another event, Shipley used a taser on a teenage girl, arguing that he felt threatened by her friends, and that she possibly had a weapon. The girl in question refused to obey his order to sit on the curb. Finding no evidence of a weapon in the video taken by the police body camera Shipley wore, and no evidence that the group in question behaved in an aggressive or hostile manner, the Department gave Shipley a one-day suspension. In this encounter recorded on the body camera, the youth in question can be heard calmly intervening on behalf of the young woman, one man admonishing Shipley, "Dude, she's a girl" (Farzan 2017).

To place this imperiled whiteness and masculinity within a more collective context, we can consider what daily policing entails in Winslow, the relentless cycle of evicting Indigenous people from the town, and the making of white settler masculinity (and femininity) through these practices. If Shipley's service record offers evidence that he was a haunted man, an aggressive police officer who was easily provoked and who had a particular interest in asserting his power over Indians, and young Indian women in particular, it also confirms that his violence was sanctioned. Shipley's record of multiple incidents of use of force against Indians did not overly trouble the police department, inviting only minor rebukes. In 12 other instances Shipley was found to have used force on suspects, (including tasering an Indigenous man waiting on a hospital trolley for medical treatment) actions for which he faced few consequences. He was, however, required to complete diversity training, presumably because all these use of force incidents involved Indians (Jeong 2016). When the violence finally ended in the loss of life, the Department offered its assistance in constructing the legal basis for his exoneration. For example, Shipley carried extra, unauthorised guns in his car. The matter of his authorisation to carry the guns was quickly dispensed with during the investigation of Tsingine's death. Sergeant Tolliver could not remember authorising any training in the use of these weapons but then later claimed he could have forgotten. Tellingly, Shipley's personnel records begin with the fact that a supervisor recommended that he not be hired on the grounds that he was emotionally volatile and used force inappropriately. He was nevertheless hired and remained on the force in spite of this history. Protected to the end, in spite of documented irregularities, it should also be noted that it was Shipley's superior officer, Sergeant Cano, who advised him not to bother with bandages for Tsingine and who backed up his story about a justified use of force. It is also his police Chief who advised him "don't say anything" immediately after the shooting (Arizona Dept. of Public Safety 2016). Finally, it was the Department of Justice that refused to investigate the Winslow Police.

The Encounter and the Incident Review

An aggrieved, anxiety ridden and colonial subject confronting an imagined 'wild Indian' is the narrative that gives coherence to Shipley's shooting of Tsingine. Its intrinsic racial logic is evident both in Shipley's behaviour at the scene and in the account he gives during the interrogation where, with assistance from the police themselves, it becomes the story of record. The story rests on the idea that Shipley is a man guided by rational aims, acting professionally to confront a threat, manifest or latent in any Indian who crosses his path. The visual record of the shooting available from Shipley's body camera is enlisted to give substance to the story of fear and threat. The manner in which this occurs during the investigation of Shipley's actions reveals the structuring role of racial logic and offers hints of the racial fantasy and racial feelings that marked the encounter.

It was a mere 22 seconds from the time Officer Shipley made contact with Loreal Tsingine to the time he fired his gun five times and killed her. Police typically defend shootings with recourse to a codified narrative about use of force, one that typically invokes the phrases 'edged weapons' and 'the 21 foot rule', and a newly emerging discourse about 'persons in mental health crisis' in formulaic ways that frame the victim as a threat (emanating from the irrational behaviour of a mentally ill person), a threat that only deadly force could contain (Racial Violence Hub 2020). Scholars have noted the importance of race to the police narrative of containing deadly force through violence. For instance, the iconic moment when, twenty-five years ago the beating of Rodney King by ten police officers was captured on a bystander's video of the event, the Los Angeles police defended their actions as necessary to contain the threat that King posed. Addressing the problem of how King came to be seen on the videotape as the agent rather than the victim of violence, Judith Butler ( 1993) describes the visual field itself as a racial formation or episteme (as Fanon first argued) in which white paranoia transforms King's blows into the "blows he never delivered, but which he is, by virtue of his blackness, always about to deliver" (19). In his analysis of the video of the King beating, Feldman ( 1994) adds that increasing objectification increases our capacity to inflict pain and, crucially, to render the Other's pain as inadmissible. To achieve the transformation "where King's body could be processed as a racial, a disciplinary, and a legal object," his body had to be rendered pre-social. The police were merely taming and caging King, achieving "the neutering of the animalized body" (211). King is rendered bestial to the point that he could not feel. The police reenact their violence in court, performing King's body as a spectrum of aggressive movements.

It is easy to spot the police coding schemes that Butler and Feldman identify with respect to the beating of Rodney King, in the police narration of the videotape of the shooting of Loreal Tsingine. The 22 seconds that elapses between the time Shipley first encounters Tsingine and when he fires five bullets is narrated second by second and each second becomes an event that conveys professional action on the part of the police. Police language assists with this endeavour. Twenty-two seconds stretch much longer and it is easy to forget that such an abbreviated time span cannot contain the reasoned, professional practices itemised by the police. The police's narration begins with the note that the first thirty seconds of the recorded film contain no audio. Audio begins at the 30 second mark, a scant 8 seconds after the shooting has occurred. The Incident Review offers this fact in the passive voice, "At approximatively thirty seconds, the audio was turned on," (Jacobs 2014c, 20) and we are not directed to the fact that Officer Shipley himself had to turn it on before it changed from buffering mode to event mode when audio begins, as the User Manual instructs (TASER International 2014). The first 'event' of the shooting is of Shipley exiting his vehicle and approaching Tsingine who was walking on the sidewalk. The writer of the Review, Officer Aaron Jacobs, volunteers the following information: "Tsingine appeared to be a Native American female with black hair" (Jacobs 2014c, 17) - a racial categorisation that comes easily given that the police radio announced that the suspect was a Native American who "did a beer run" (Jacobs 2014a, 24). At the four second mark, Shipley is described as having reached Tsingine's left side, and at the five second mark, he has moved to her back. At six seconds, he is described as attempting to gain control and by the ten second mark, Shipley has grabbed her collar and hood and pulled Loreal to the ground, standing over her by the 12 second mark. She spends the next three seconds, at the 15 second mark, attempting to stand and the Review notes that a "pair of silver scissors" is then visible (Jacobs 2014b, 121). At the 13 second mark, Officer Cano's patrol SUV enters the frame. At 17 seconds, the Review records that "a plastic bag was visible in Tsingine's right hand" (Jacobs 2014c, 18). Imputing motive and purpose to Shipley, the report notes: "Shipley pushed Tsingine away in an easterly direction in an attempt to create distance from her" ([Jacobs 2014c, 18), an action that resulted in items falling from her purse including the pill bottles that would later be used to emphasise her problems with mental illness. At 18 seconds, the Report notes that Tsingine got up and began walking toward Shipley. At 19 seconds, he draws his handgun. Cano has arrived at this point and was nearly directly behind Tsingine by a few feet. He is described as walking faster at this point. Shipley is described as walking backwards while Tsingine is described as "lunging" at him when he fires his weapon three times at the 22 second mark (Jacobs 2014c, 19). The video cannot easily confirm these descriptions of movement but the narration slows down a story frame by frame about a menacing, advancing threat that two police officers cannot contain except through shooting.

Even after she is shot five times, Tsingine continues to be described as advancing threat. As in the King video, where small movements are enlisted to tell a story of overwhelming threat, Tsingine is described as active and as "holding her body off the ground with her right hand, while her left hand was draped over her body," a position she holds for two seconds (Jacobs 2014c, 19). The narration isolates each actor in the frame and the two seconds, from the 25 second point to the 27 second point is broken down by actor so that we have a sense that a great deal is going on:

At approximately twenty-seven seconds, Cano was still talking on the radio, and Tsingine still held her body up. Shipley's weapon was still trained on Tsingine. Shipley could be seen removing his left hand from his weapon, and appeared to be bringing it back to the TASER camera "on" switch. (Jacobs 2014c, 20, emphasis added)

Rendered as a force that will not stop coming, even after five bullets, perhaps even a supernatural force, Tsingine remains the aggressor from whom Shipley is defending himself by moving backwards and even attempting to taser (something the evidence does not support). If Tsingine's hand rises after she is shot, and she remains for an uncanny amount of time as someone who "still held her body up" (Jacobs 2014c, 20), this is not narrated as the involuntary movements that are the response of someone suffering, someone who has been shot multiple times. It is, instead, a threat subsiding. If, as Butler argued with respect to Rodney King, the raising of his hand after suffering numerous blows was read as evidence that King was in control, it is the brutality that King was said to embody that transforms him into the author of his own misfortune. Rodney King, Butler ( 1993) suggests becomes in this moment "reduced to a phantasm of white racist aggression," his body at once the site upon which white racist violence disavows itself and the place where desire is similarly disavowed through violence (20). Colonialism, Meyda Yegenoglu ( 1998) reminds us, is structured by unconscious, sexualised processes where fantasy and desire play a fundamental role. The colonial subject is constituted through an encounter with the racial/cultural Other, becoming through an active denial of the Other's difference but nonetheless disturbed and haunted by masculine dreams of possession. Tsingine's body is reduced to a phantasm and the desire that circulates and is disavowed, an amalgam of desiring and imperiled white masculinity, is apparent in Shipley's own narrative below.

"I Felt a Fear and a Threat"

Feeling both the fear that Tsingine refuses to recognise him as authority and the threat that is a projection of his own fear, Shipley narrates himself in the police interview as a professional confronted by a wild Indian, a thread enabled by the questions that are asked and those that are not asked by his interviewers (Jacobs 2014d). As above, in the official narration of the video, equipped with the stock arsenal of the 21-foot rule and related police concepts, Shipley presents himself, and is presented, as the police professional who utilised everything he had been taught about how to confront an overwhelming threat. The narrative is based on what Shipley is feeling, the feeling offering the basis on which we understand what he is doing. As the story of Shipley's feelings, it is always defensible, and made more so by the historical storyline about the irrational savage, maddened with fury, and assaulting the white man. Its gendered dimensions are apparent in the sense that Tsingine does not belong to the feminine gender in the narrative. She is not a petite young woman in a ponytail but rather a near unstoppable force of nature, a force only bullets can contain.

As in the incident review, the narrative force of the interview derives from the presentation of Shipley's professional behaviour, and Tsingine's irrationality. As the video recorded, it took four seconds for Shipley to reach Tsingine once he parked his car and yelled "Police. Stop!" (Jacobs 2014d, 5) In six more seconds, he has positioned Tsingine on the ground, an action that one witness described as "slamming her to the ground" but which Shipley describes as a series of professional actions: "I gave verbal commands;" (Jacobs 2014d, 5) "I tried to put her arms behind her back; I tried to get her on her stomach; I used the 'soft holds' technique and did not apply my full force because I didn't want to hurt her" (Jacobs 2014d, 13). As the seconds go by in slow motion, the next ten seconds also entail a series of professional calculations. Shipley, for instance describes that he kept the 21-foot rule in mind when he assessed the level of threat. The situation is nevertheless so tense that he develops "tunnel vision" (Jacobs 2014d, 2)2 and is not sure of where his partner is, his eyes focused on the threat in front of him. Solicitous of their interviewee, especially when he appears early on to be overcome with emotion, and sharing the same bank of professional knowledge, the police appear to bond over the shared language of edged weapons and the 21-foot rule.

There can be no other role for Tsingine but that of an out of control, irrational threat and Shipley's account is shaped by a careful and judicious sprinkling of adjectives to describe Tsingine's state of mind. Tsingine is in his view "actively resisting;" "making furtive movements"; "aggressively walking" (Jacobs 2014d, 6). Her demeanor is "blank" and she is silent (Jacobs 2014d, 9). Recalling her "blank" demeanor, Shipley remembers the prescription pill bottles falling out of her purse and we and the interviewers are left to connect the dots, lines that will explain Tsingine's irrationality as due to mental illness. Impressing upon the interviewers Tsingine's aggression and instability, Shipley recalls his own state of mind at the time: "What the hell, why is this lady resisting?" "Why did this have to happen? Why does this woman have scissors? Why was she trying to kill me?" (Jacobs 2014d, 12) Tsingine's behaviour was incomprehensible, Shipley concludes, especially when he considered that this was only a misdemeanour crime (Jacobs 2014d, 12). She committed aggravated assault on a police officer, he concludes, and apparently for no reason. In the end, all he could have wished for, was that he didn't come to work that day. Tsingine's body, converted into threat and disposed of, generates Shipley, the police professional confronted with crazed and unruly Indians on a regular basis, people doing a beer run. Apparently traumatised by the encounter, it is Shipley, his narrative insists, for whom we should feel sorry. As with King, imagined, in Feldman's ( 1994) words as a "resistant body without senses and without corresponding judgment" (213). Tsingine is narrated as an animalised body that feels no pain, a body that holds within it an intrinsic violence created by alcohol. What gives the story its appeal, as Feldman memorably observed with respect to King, is "unfinished history as mise-en-scene" ( 1994, 209). We might consider, then, the unfinished history in which Shipley, a white man and a police officer, and Tsingine, a Navajo woman, both feature, the ongoing extractive regimes and the racial terror on which they depend, and the colonial subjects whose anxieties are assuaged, and who regenerate, through violence.

Conclusion

Colin Dayan ( 2011) has powerfully argued that white vulnerability to Black savagery is a baseline narrative in the law, whether with respect to police shootings or to cruel and unusual punishment. This is also the narrative that fuels gun culture and that gave rise to the second amendment's right to bear arms (Dunbar-Ortiz 2018). Commenting on Dayan's ( 2011) book The Law is a White Dog, discussing the legal rituals that transform prisoners into "unpersons" against whom all force is justified, Angela Davis observes that the logic of prisoners as less than human shows us "how the ghosts of slavery animate institutions" (cited in Dayan 2011, back cover). If we see the afterlives of slavery in prisons and in police shootings, both in their frequency and in police impunity, how might we understand the police shooting of a young Navajo woman and the legal narratives that justify it? Although it is certain that a justice system that is organised around the disposability of Black bodies sweeps up in its ambit all racialised persons, when the target is a young, Navajo woman, it is necessary to consider what settler colonialism has to do with the violence Shipley enacted and the legal and social approval of it. Settler colonialism is an ongoing project that preserves intact its colonial, spatial and legal structures. Dispossession continues apace with extraction as the engine that drives the racial project of accumulation. We can expect, then, that both the ghost of slavery and the ghost of settler colonialism animate institutions such as prisons and policing.

I have argued that, with its emphasis on extraction, a white settler society targets Indigenous land and Indigenous people. In this regard, police shootings of Indigenous people and the legal response to police use of force (along with everyday settler violence) are a part of the racial terror that is a central part of settler colonialism. As an ongoing racial project of accumulation, settler colonialism requires the enforcement of colonial lines of force. This is abundantly in evidence in the reservation border town where policing entails the eviction of the native from the settler town, a perpetual drawing of the lines of power between settlers and natives. The settler imagines himself or herself threatened at every turn by the native and obliged to use extreme force. A circulating colonial affect, threat narratives produce embattled colonisers who feel a fear and a threat and who do what they have to do, as Shipley did when he shot Loreal Tsingine. In the settler's psyche as in the streets of the border town, wild Indians are everywhere and can only be controlled through force. There is plenty to indicate that Officer Shipley undertook his daily duties within such a colonial imaginary. As Slotkin ( 1973) has shown, the Indian fighter remains a central figure in American national mythology, requiring settlers to bear arms and to defend white property through violence. As Indian fighter turned cop, Shipley is able to count on institutional support for his activities; indeed, Indian fighting is his job. The story in police shootings of "I did what I had to do" and "I felt a fear and a threat" (Jacobs 2014b, 24-25), official statements made by Officer Shipley in referring to his shooting of Loreal Tsingine is one that is powered by race, dependent as it is on the idea that Indians always pose a threat to the settler, a threat that only considerable force can dissolve. Scripting himself as imperiled, and sustained institutionally for doing what he had to do in the wake of such a racial threat, Shipley can exercise force against Tsingine with impunity.

The last word to Loreal Tsingine: Indigenous Refusal

In the 22 seconds of the police encounter captured on the police body camera, one of the first things I imagine I see in Tsingine's face is fear. The last thing I think I see of her is defiance. Perhaps even the blank stare Shipley describes is evidence of this defiance. Initially walking away from Shipley, who pursues her and throws her to the pavement, she stands up and walks towards him, apparent determination in her stride. I think of this moment as one that shares the sentiment of the hashtag #Iftheygunmedownwhichpicturewouldtheyuse (Stampler 2014). The inevitability of the moment, the end that those who are racially targeted anticipate, finally comes. Is this refusal, a final bringing to an end of a life of endless confrontation, a defiant inhabiting of the category of disposable? Even as I imagine refusal, I think about my own stakes in the story. The sources I mine for the police narratives discussed here do not easily give up insights either into Loreal Tsingine's humanity or her suffering. They do, however, reveal the contours of a colonial encounter, one structured by violence and terror. Yet I betray her if I don't find ways to resurrect the person who was killed, the person who struggled with racial terror and who may have found this last moment to confront it. Constructed by the police as animalistic threat who rises up after five bullets to confront a police officer seeking to apprehend her, I want to re-write this narrative, leaving an image not of superhuman aggression but of an insistence on being recognised and perhaps a taunt and despair: I am (still here).

Notes

1. 1.

Statistics of police killings by race are notoriously complicated. In 2016, The Guardian reports that of the 2016 people killed by police, 24 were Native Americans and 266 were African American. When considered relative to percentage of the population, Native Americans who constitute 0.8 % of the population comprise 1.9% of police shootings while African Americans comprise 13% of the population and comprise 26% of police shootings. These figures suggest comparable rates of police shootings. An important issue to consider is who is counted as Native American or African American. A second important point is whether Native Americans are more likely to die in cells rather than in police shootings. Additionally, see: Mike Males, "Who are Police Killing", Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (August 26, 2014), https://www.cjcj.org/news/8113 This study using data from the federal Centers for Disease Control, showed that over a 12-year period, Native Americans were statistically more likely to be killed by police than any other group, including African-Americans. John Swaine et al. "The Counted, 2015 and 2016 datasets", The Guardian (2017) https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/01/the-counted-police-killings-us-database This study revealed that between 2015 and 2016, Native Americans were the only racial group to see their death toll due to police shootings go up, even as the number of officer-involved shootings across the country fell.

2. 2.

Police narratives frequently mention tunnel vision which suggests that it is a concept that police learn in training. See: Force Science Institute, "New Findings Expand Understanding of Tunnel Vision, Auditory Blocking and Lag Time," Police One, Aug 1, 2005. https://www.policeone.com/officer-shootings/articles/1247087-New-findings-expand-understanding-of-tunnel-vision-auditory-blocking-and-lag-time/ See also, David Montero, "'Why Am I Going to Die Today?': The Words of First Responders to Deadly Las Vegas Shooting," Los Angeles Times, May 25, 2018. https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-vegas-police-shooting-2018-story.html.

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Stephanie Santos and Bianca Beauchemin for research assistance, Jennifer Denetdale, Melanie Yazzie and David Correia for their insights and Leslie Thielen Wilson and the reviewers for their comments.

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Department of Gender Studies, UCLA, 1120 Rolfe Hall, Box 951504, Los Angeles, CA, 90095-1504, USA

Sherene H. Razack

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Correspondence to Sherene H. Razack.

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Razack, S.H. Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror: The Police Shooting of Loreal Tsingine. Fem Leg Stud 28, 1-20 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10691-020-09426-2
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Keywords

Indigenous women

Policing

Racial violence

Settler colonialism

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Settler Colonialism, Policing and Racial Terror: The Police Shooting of Loreal Tsingine

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On 27 March 2014, Loreal Tsingine, a 27-year-old Navajo woman was shot and killed by Austin Shipley, a white male police officer, also 27 years old, who said he was trying to apprehend her for a suspected shoplifting. Shipley was never charged, and the Department of Justice declined to investigate the Winslow police on the matter.

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Resources and Guidance

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Filming Police Abuse: A Roundup of Resources and Guidance
By Jackie Zammuto
As the WITNESS Media Lab explores the impact of eyewitness videos of police abuse in the United States, we are also examining what bystanders need to know in order to document police encounters safely and effectively. Some of the most common questions we hear are:

What are my rights to film a police encounter?

What information should I record, and how?

I've just filmed police abuse. What should I do with the video? What are the most effective ways to share it?

While there is no right or wrong answer to most of these questions, the decisions an eyewitness makes before, during and after filming can determine how effective their footage can be in achieving accountability for injustice.

To address these questions, we've compiled a list of resources from groups like American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), CopWatch, People's Justice, and WITNESS, that provide guidance for those who film police encounters in the U.S. They are divided into the following categories: Know Your Rights, Filming Techniques, Livestreaming, Distribution & Reporting, and Preservation. Below are a few recommendations from each category. You can view the full list here.

Additionally, there are numerous groups across the country that take part in Copwatch, a decentralized network of groups that pro-actively document police interactions in their communities as a de-escalation tactic and a form of community self-defense. If you are interested in getting involved, we encourage you to get in touch with these groups for additional training and guidance on interacting with local police. Here are just a few suggestions: California - Ella Baker Center Justice Teams, Anti Police-Terror Project, Texas - Peaceful Streets, Missouri - WeCopwatch/St. Louis First Responders, New York - Copwatch Alliance, El Grito de Sunset Park. Let us know if there are other groups you'd recommend.

Know Your Rights

Filming Techniques

Livestreaming

Distribution & Reporting

Preservation

WITNESS - Activists Guide to Archiving Video: Archiving video is an essential, but often overlooked component of video advocacy. Learn best practices for organizing, storing, preserving, and sharing your footage. WITNESS also produced a series of short videos covering archiving basics, such as Planning to Preserve Video for Human Rights, Deconstructing Digital Video for Activists and What is Video Metadata?

We Need Your Help!

This is part of an ongoing effort to assess the needs for filming police abuse safely and effectively, and we need your help. What resources have we missed? Where would you like to see more guidance? Please share your thoughts in this form or Tweet them to @witnessorg. We look forward to hearing from you!
Featured Image: Still from New York Times video Copwatch vs. Cops: After Freddie Gray

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Filming Police Abuse: A Roundup of Resources and Guidance

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
By Jackie Zammuto As the WITNESS Media Lab explores the impact of eyewitness videos of police abuse in the United States, we are also examining what bystanders need to know in order to document police encounters safely and effectively. Some of the most common questions we hear are: What are my rights to film a police encounter?

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(OPTIONAL) Borrow from your local library or stream on Amazon Prime.

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In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, "Remember This House." The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and assassinations of three of his close friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. 

At the time of Baldwin's death in 1987, he left behind only 30 completed pages of this manuscript. 
In I Am Not Your Negro, filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished. Narrated by Samuel L. Jackson.

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Watch Time: The Kalief Browder Story | Netflix

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This series traces the tragic case of Kalief Browder, a Black Bronx teen who spent three horrific years in jail, despite not being convicted of a crime. Watch trailers & learn more.