I just finished the wondrous book Who Do You Serve, Who Do You Protect?: Police Violence and Resistance in the United States which is edited by Joe Macaré, Maya Schenwar, and Alana Yu-lan Price. It's basically an anthology of texts from Truthout, a nonprofit news organization dedicated to providing independent reporting and commentary on a diverse range of social justice issues.
The anthology was published in 2015 and still strikes several extremely heavy strings due to how Black Lives Matter evolves now, shortly after the killing of George Floyd. One example of this:
His last words, eerily, were, “I can’t breathe.” And in a case similar to that of Tamir Rice, in 2013, a sheriff’s deputy in Santa Rosa, California, killed 13-year-old Andy Lopez, who was carrying a toy pellet rifle.
Get the book. There is so much more to these stories than what I've quoted, and to get the full picture, get the book.
The following are all excerpts from the articles, almost all of which are available on the Truthout page.
Foreword: Alicia Garza
Black people are fighting for our right to live while Black.
When Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi and I started #BlackLivesMatter—an organizing network fighting back against anti-Black racism and state-sanctioned violence—in 2013, after George Zimmerman was acquitted in the murder of teenager Trayvon Martin, we understood that what’s happening to Black people in this country and around the world is much larger than just police and policing alone. Poverty, unemployment, lack of access to quality and affordable education, and HIV/AIDS are just a few of the issues impacting Black people disproportionately to our percentage of the population. When Zimmerman murdered an unarmed Black child and got away with it, we saw not just an individual act of cowardice and prejudice expressed as vigilantism, but also the effects of a highly racist society that sees Black bodies as disposable.
Even Zimmerman’s defense—claiming he was scared for his life and forced to act in “self-defense”—reflects the deeply ingrained fear of Black bodies, particularly Black male bodies, in a society shaped by the largely racist war on drugs, which demonizes Black men and portrays them as a potential threat that must be eliminated. Of course, police violence and state-sanctioned violence do not just impact cisgender Black men. Black women like Rekia Boyd, Renisha McBride and Mya Hall are also caught in this web. Roughly 35 percent of Black trans folks have been arrested or held in a cell due to bias at some point in their lives, and more than half of Black trans folks report discomfort seeking police assistance, according to the National LGBTQ Task Force.
Introduction: Maya Schenwar, Joe Macaré and Alana Yu-lan Price
“To Protect and Serve” won the Los Angeles Police Department’s motto contest in 1955, and in the decades since, the slogan has been slapped on patrol cars across the country. Though it’s catchy, the motto is remarkably unspecific: Who—or what—is being protected? Who is being served? What are police actually doing in the United States, and toward what ends?
What does “being free” mean, in relation to the police? Rachel Herzing has an answer: Instead of “police reform”—slapping Band-Aids on torture and death—we must find ways to shrink the role of police in our lives, striving toward the eventual abolition of the institution of police.
In Chapter 14 Mike Ludwig urges readers to consider making an unusual New Year’s resolution: “Don’t Call the Police.” Ludwig isn’t saying that those who do call the police are somehow betraying their communities; rather, he holds that resolving to avoid unnecessary 911 calls is simultaneously a protest against a racist and brutal system and a challenge to create vibrant new structures with which to build safety.
What would a world beyond policing look like? In Chapter 15, Candice Bernd profiles community groups that are working to provide “first-response” care in ways that minimize contact with the police, particularly in the case of mental health emergencies and other situations in which police have a proven record of exacerbating the immediate circumstances of those involved. These experiments—grounded in the principle of neighbors caring for neighbors—provide glimmers of how we might create our own modes of safety and security.
Challenging the police as an institution must involve asking big and unsettling questions. What does being safe even mean? How many of our society’s assumptions about safety are grounded in racism, injustice and violence? If we can’t count on an ever-present state “service” to “protect” us, what can we count on? Is it possible to build toward a world in which we can count on each other?
Killing the Future: The Theft of Black Life: Nicholas Powers
“Tell me of the night your son was killed by the police,” I asked. She sat up, and a deep sorrow moved in her eyes. “I had a habit of looking out the window to see my son,” Danette Chavis said. “But that night, I said to myself, ‘Oh, leave the boy alone,’ and took a nap. The phone woke me up, and my daughter was rushing out of the door. I followed her and saw police tape, cops standing around a body. I yelled to see if it was him. But they wouldn’t let me close. Later, I went to the morgue and identified my son.” We sat in the café; a few seconds passed in silence. She looked away as if seeing him dead for the first time, and I regretted asking the question. Around us, people typed on laptops or chatted over coffee. They were so carefree. How do we reach a city that mostly looks at people of color in contempt or pity rather than solidarity? How do we get them to listen? I looked up from my notebook. “Ms. Chavis,” I asked. “What do you miss most about your son?”
The stages of grief depend on narrative closure, the shoveling of dirt on the casket, the eulogizing of the dead. But for African-American parents whose children were slain by law enforcement, the stages of grief grind to a halt. The dead cannot be laid to rest because the cop who murdered them is not held accountable, and the violence is condoned. To eclipse the officer’s guilt, the victims are “niggerized” in public. Have a criminal record? It will be paraded in public. Ever took silly gangsta photos? They will be proof of a “thug life.” The parents see their child’s image warped as they learn of more Black and Latino youth killed by cops. In a solidarity of despair, they embrace everyone’s lost children, as if they can hear the dead repeating their final words, asking for their lives back.
Stealing Black lives at gunpoint is the most visible and violent evidence of history repeating in the present. To be Black in America is to be evidence of a theft. It is to be a descendant of human beings stolen from villages, stolen from their bodies, stolen from each other, sold and sold again. It is to see, in one’s family history, ancestors stolen from their language, stolen from their land and left as walking targets. Inevitably we, their descendants, are shot at with everything from microaggressions to all-out physical violence, from suspicious stares to racial slurs, from stop-and-frisk to bullets.
To be Black in America is to know white supremacy is a culture of theft. We feel it like a tornado that one can try to sidestep but that sometimes descends on us anyway, ripping us out of our bodies. It’s like an ancient vortex that split from another vortex, a slavery split from older forms of slavery that mixed with European capitalism, colonization and scientific racism. A whiteness took shape that churned through centuries and over continents, pulling people from their homes and “blackening” them. Whiteness is a social structure of extraction that rose in the triangular trade of slave ships, auction blocks and plantations. It was broken by the Civil War, remade as Jim Crow in segregated public spaces and redlined ghettos, then reinvented again as a war on drugs.
“Every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword,” President Abraham Lincoln said in his second inaugural address. As smoke from the Civil War cleared, he pointed to the line we had crossed. Slavery was a national sin; those freed from it were its victims; those who defended it, the new villains. But it was a line trampled by white mobs and terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, riding horses into the night to burn Black homes and then Black people themselves. The legal infrastructure of slavery was broken, but the culture of racism washed over the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments like a tide, its deep currents pushing back against the new citizens. In order to survive, each generation of Black people picked up that line drawn between slavery and freedom, held it up and carried it forward. But at every step they took, they hit the thin blue wall of the police.
As I write this in the early months of 2015, more than 300 people have been murdered by police, only a tiny fraction of them in a gunfight. Most were unarmed. According to KilledByPolice.net, more than 3,087 have been murdered since 2013. By the time you read this, the number of dead will have climbed higher and higher. But no one can measure the full extent of this dizzying spiral of violence, because no federal-level, comprehensive database on how many Americans are killed by law enforcement exists. FBI Director James Comey told reporters, “It’s ridiculous I can’t tell you how many people were shot by police in this country, last week, last year, the last decade.”
“What do you miss about your son?” I asked. She half-smiled. “His laughter and how protective he was over his sisters.” She rocked back and forth for a second. “You know, the night he was killed, when I was asleep, I tried to get up but felt a weight on my chest. I think it was my son telling me what was happening to him, you know, that he couldn’t get up. “Some families never recover. I know mothers on drugs. Fathers who are alcoholics,” she said. “A child’s death creates a division in the family. Some just want to let it go. They’re hurt, depressed. Others want to fight until they get justice. My youngest didn’t take it very well.” “How so?” I put down my pen. “She would sit up,” Chavis said, “and look out the window, waiting for him to come home.”
Ring of Snitches: How Detroit Police Slapped False Murder Convictions on Young Black Men: Aaron Miguel Cantú
A 2005 report published by the Northwestern University School of Law2 traced the first documented use of “snitch testimony” in the United States to 1819, when the state of Vermont convicted Jesse Boorn for murder based on testimony from his cellmate. The cellmate told a judge that Boorn confessed to the crime inside their jail cell while awaiting his trial. In exchange for testifying, the cellmate was freed after Boorn’s trial, and Boorn was sentenced to the gallows.
In a broad review of all state defendants wrongfully convicted of capital murder, the Illinois Commission on Capital Punishment found that prosecution often “relied unduly on the uncorroborated testimony of a witness with something to gain,” including “in-custody informants,”5 and passed a law preventing death sentences if a conviction was based on the “uncorroborated testimony of an accomplice or a jail-house snitch.” Similarly, California reopened 225 cases in 1989 after an informant blew the lid off the way Los Angeles prosecutors fed prewritten testimonies to informants, and the state later adopted a law requiring that informant testimony be held to higher proof standards.
Before Jonathan Hewitt was sentenced to four years in prison in 1994, he says he spent months in a cell on the ninth floor of the Detroit Police Department waiting for his trial. While he was there, he claims, homicide detectives offered him and at least six other prisoners food and drink, conjugal visits, time to watch television, and, most importantly, the promise of lenient sentences if they testified against other prisoners also being held in the jail cells on the ninth floor. Hewitt says police told informants that a deal for their reduced sentences would be hatched after the suspect’s trial, so that they would not have to acknowledge it in court, which could have swayed jurors away from a conviction.
“I don’t know how to reconcile or accept this. I just don’t know how, so I don’t try,” he told Truthout, adding that he spent much of his time “reading and rebelling.” Even after nearly two decades of imprisonment, Hamilton rages against prisons, police and a whole social order founded on oppression. “How some of us live is not a mistake; neither is it the product of a broken system,” he wrote in an essay from prison. “We live like that because it is profitable to a lot of people and businesses: pawn shops, payday loan services, slum lords, creditors, social services, and others who traffic in misery.”
Amid Shootings, Chicago Police Department Upholds Culture of Impunity: Sarah Macaraeg and Alison Flowers
“I’m not the person like I was,” he said. “I’m just not really coming back around. Only time I can kick it is when I’m out of town. When I’m in Chicago, I can’t be myself.”
“Police departments are quasi-military organizations,” said Art Lurigio, a criminologist and clinical psychologist who teaches at Loyola University. “The police are authorized to use force in ways that no other citizen is authorized to act.”
“The data we have would suggest conditions of virtual impunity for abusive officers,” said writer and human rights activist Jamie Kalven of the Invisible Institute. “That means full-time gangsters. That means utterly cruel individuals who get off on humiliating African-Americans or women. A small amount on the force, but a huge impact.”
Officer Gildardo Sierra In 2011, CPD Superintendent Garry McCarthy, speaking with the Chicago Tribune, confirmed the department did not maintain any internal system to track officers involved in multiple shootings. In a span of six months that same year, Officer Gildardo Sierra shot three people—two of them fatally. Flint Farmer was the last of those shot by Sierra, who had been called on a domestic disturbance to Farmer’s Englewood location. When Sierra and his partner arrived, Farmer took off running. At the next block, Sierra, who later claimed he “feared for his life,” began shooting at Farmer, who was unarmed.
Discharging his weapon a total of 16 times, Sierra hit Farmer with seven of his bullets. It was the final three shots that killed Farmer, according to the Cook County medical examiner. A patrol car video shows Sierra walking in a semicircle around Farmer, who is lying face down on the ground, wounded, before firing three shots into his back, killing him. The shots are illuminated in the video by muzzle flashes indicative of close range. Farmer’s family settled their civil suit for $4.1 million. Yet Cook County State’s Attorney Anita Alvarez ruled the shooting justified. After a two-year investigation, county prosecutors concluded that evidence supported Sierra’s claim that he had acted in self-defense—after mistaking Farmer’s cellphone for a weapon. “Not every mistake demands the action of the criminal justice system, even when the results are tragic,” Alvarez wrote in a letter to McCarthy.
Stripped of police powers, Sierra was transferred to the city’s 311 call center. Near the beginning of his career on the force, Sierra had been awarded the Distinguished Service Award by the Fraternal Order of Police. At the City Council Finance Committee meeting in which the settlement was approved, Leslie Darling, an attorney for the City of Chicago, told council members Farmer’s shooting was in fact the eighth in which Sierra was involved. City data lists Sierra as a police officer with a salary of $78,012.
Still on the Force Truthout’s investigation identified a number of additional officers who have pulled the trigger in instances of highly controversial civilian deaths. Including officers already mentioned herein, the investigation revealed that, among officers currently serving on the force, at least five have shot and killed civilians from behind, and each has a record of more than 10 misconduct complaints in five years. Among this group is Officer John Fitzgerald, who shot Aaron Harrison, a black 18-year-old, in 2007, after garnering 25 misconduct complaints between 2001 and 2006. A member of Special Operations, Fitzgerald was awarded the Superintendent’s Award of Valor in 2010, according to a CPD news release, for the incident. The shooting was ruled justified by IPRA, largely based on two pieces of evidence: Fitzgerald’s assertion that Harrison was attempting to shoot him while running away, and a gun recovered on the scene. Multiple witnesses asserted Harrison was unarmed. In 2013, Harrison’s family’s civil suit settled for $8.5 million.
Whether citizens are actually guilty of the perceived offense that leads to apprehension is not what shakes their sense of justice, according to Art Lurigio, criminologist and clinical psychologist at Loyola University. “More important to citizens than the actual outcome is how they were treated,” Lurigio said. “This ain’t a fair fight anymore.”
Beyond Homan Square: US History Is Steeped in Torture: Adam Hudson
The fatal shooting of unarmed Black teenager Michael Brown at the hands of white police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, not only sparked a nationwide social movement challenging police brutality but also amplified media scrutiny of the US legal system. One example is the recent Guardian investigation of a detention facility in Chicago’s Homan Square, where police take people for harsh, off-the-book interrogations without reading them their rights, denying access to attorneys. The facility is deemed “the domestic equivalent of a CIA black site” since suspects are effectively “disappeared.” While this is the first time Homan Square has been discussed in the mainstream press, it hardly represents anything new or unique in Chicago, or in the United States as a whole. If anything, Homan Square reflects a norm rather than a deviation from US legal and national security policy.
The Guardian’s report on Homan Square is quite staggering. Special police units, such as anti-gang and anti-drug forces, take witnesses or arrestees to a warehouse in Homan Square for clandestine interrogations. According to The Guardian, “Witnesses, suspects or other Chicagoans who end up inside do not appear to have a public, searchable record entered into a database indicating where they are, as happens when someone is booked at a precinct.” Lawyers and relatives say “there is no way” of finding out where arrestees are. “Those lawyers who have attempted to gain access to Homan Square are most often turned away, even as their clients remain in custody inside,” The Guardian reports. Police abuses in Homan Square include “keeping arrestees out of official booking databases”; “beating by police, resulting in head wounds”; “shackling for prolonged periods”; “denying attorneys access to the ‘secure’ facility”; and “holding people without legal counsel for between 12 and 24 hours, including people as young as 15.” The victims of these harsh police interrogations are usually poor Black and Brown Chicagoans.
However, it would be wrong to read this story and come away thinking that it’s a departure from typical US jurisprudence, in the same way it would be wrong to view torture as just a post-9/11 feature of US “national security” policy. Nor is it right to view Homan Square as something unique to Chicago. Throughout its history, the United States has tortured people, and it still does, in various forms.
Torture was inflicted on slaves in order to ensure economic productivity and docility to their masters. Slaves were required to meet production quotas; torture was deployed as a form of punishment for failing to meet those quotas. Slaveholders used multiple tools to torture, particularly whipping. Whipping, for “many southwestern whites ... was a gateway form of violence that led to bizarrely creative levels of sadism,” according to Edward Baptist in his book “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.” Other torture tools were “carpenters’ tools, chains, cotton presses, hackles, handsaws, hoe handles, irons for branding livestock, nails, pokers, smoothing irons, singletrees, steelyards, tongs.” In fact, Baptist writes, “Every modern method of torture was used at one time or another: sexual humiliation, mutilation, electric shocks, solitary confinement in ‘stress positions,’ burning, even waterboarding.” In addition, armed slave patrols monitored, stopped, searched, arrested and terrorized runaway, enslaved and even free Black Africans.10 Slave patrols’ main job was to punish runaway slaves and return them to their masters, but free Africans were not immune. According to Gloria J. Browne-Marshall, a professor at CUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice, “Free Africans were susceptible to capture by bounty hunters who could sell them into slavery. The word of a free black man in a Southern court meant nothing under the law.”11 In fact, the slave patrols’ method of stopping and searching both free and enslaved Blacks can be considered a predecessor to modern-day stop-and-frisk. Those slave patrols helped lay the foundation for modern US policing. Once slavery ended, so did slave patrols, but Southern whites’ fears of Blacks did not dissipate. As a result, police squads and vigilante groups like the Ku Klux Klan formed and revived slave patrols’ practices.
Moreover, rather than solely fighting crime, a key purpose of US policing has been social control of “dangerous classes,” along with suppressing labor protests.13 Those “dangerous classes” were usually Black people, Native Americans, the poor, the homeless and immigrants—people seen as inherently prone to violent, immoral and disorderly behavior. As Victor E. Kappeler of Eastern Kentucky University’s School of Justice Studies wrote, “New England settlers appointed Indian Constables to police Native Americans,” and “St. Louis police were founded to protect residents from Native Americans in that frontier city.” To this day, those communities remain heavily policed and criminalized.
The committee also condemned the use of solitary confinement in US prisons. Solitary confinement or isolation is when prisoners are held in isolated cells with no human contact for 22 to 24 hours a day. Isolation is used to punish or discipline prisoners, but it is also used for “safety” and “health-related” reasons. (For example, prisoners who indicate they may harm themselves are often placed in solitary confinement.) According to watchdog groups like the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Solitary Watch, around 80,000 prisoners are held in solitary confinement in the United States, many of whom are mentally ill. Even juvenile prisoners—children—are held in solitary confinement. Time spent in solitary confinement varies, but many prisoners spend multiple years in isolation, including those incarcerated at “supermax” prisons entirely made up of solitary confinement units. Since humans are social creatures, solitary confinement can have serious physical and psychological effects on a person. Isolation can cause anxiety, depression, irritability, hostility, paranoia, psychosis, panic attacks, hypersensitivity to external stimuli, hallucinations, difficulty sleeping, violent fantasies, nightmares, dizziness, heart palpitations, self-harm and suicide, among other consequences. It is for these reasons that solitary confinement is considered a human rights violation and a form of torture by international bodies and human rights groups.
According to FBI data, a white police officer kills a Black person almost twice a week.
On the other hand, while the United States’ military personnel and intelligence agents are, technically, barred from torturing people, its partners are not. In November 2013, reporter Matthieu Aikins wrote a long, investigative piece in Rolling Stone about 10 Afghans who were kidnapped and tortured by US special operations forces, with Afghan interpreters at their side, in the fall of 2012.
Soon after his report was released, Aikins posted a video of Afghan military personnel and interpreters interrogating and torturing a prisoner as US commandos watched.
As shocking as the video appears, it captures a common practice. According to Aikins, “As one military intelligence soldier told me in Kandahar in 2011, they would often take a ‘smoke break’ when interrogating recalcitrant detainees, stepping outside and leaving the prisoner alone with Afghan police or soldiers.” The United States spends billions of dollars training and funding Afghan security forces38—and torture is routine in Afghan prisons.
“Never Again a World Without Us”: The Many Tentacles of State Violence Against Black-Brown-Indigenous Communities1 Roberto Rodriguez
“They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.”
–Popol Vuh
One of the most notorious cases of police violence prior to the 1960s was the Bloody Christmas incident of 1951, memorialized in the 1997 movie “LA Confidential.” It involved the 90-minute brutal beating of seven men, all but one of them Mexican, inside the Los Angeles Police Department’s central station, and one outside of his own home. Only a few of the police officers were put on trial, though none served even a year. This travesty was considered justice, an example of how the LAPD could “police its own.”
I had covered the historic trial of a sheriff’s deputy, Billy Joe McIlvain, who had executed a teenager from San Gabriel named David Dominguez in 1977. At the trial, it was revealed that it was the deputy who had kidnapped and killed Dominguez, while the deputy claimed the reverse. The deputy was given a life sentence, an extreme rarity in the history of US jurisprudence, yet he served only 13 years. Nevertheless, the fact that he served those 13 years was significant because, in many cases, people who kill Mexicans serve no time at all. For example, a South Texas rancher who shot and killed an unarmed Mexican immigrant from behind in 2000 was not sentenced to any prison time at all—he was only fined $4,000, then put on probation and set free.
At the end of October 2014, Oscar Alberto Ramirez was shot four times in the back by sheriff’s deputies in Paramount, California. On August 14, 2014, in Denver, the police viciously took down a seven-months-pregnant woman, Mayra Lazos-Guerrero, who was pleading with them to stop brutally beating her boyfriend.
A couple of months earlier, in Los Angeles, Ezell Ford was killed by the LAPD, and nine days before that, Omar Abrego was beaten to death by LAPD officers in the same vicinity. A few months before, in April, unarmed Richard Ramirez was executed, on camera, by a Billings, Montana, police officer, Grant Morrison, who was exonerated. The previous month, Alex Nieto was killed by San Francisco police officers, riddled with more than a dozen bullets from 75 feet away by police officers dispatched to look for a man with a holstered weapon. The “weapon” was Nieto’s black-and-yellow Taser, which he was required to carry for his job as a security guard. The previous month, in February, five law enforcement officers in Moore, Oklahoma, beat and suffocated Luis Rodriguez to death.
His last words, eerily, were, “I can’t breathe.” And in a case similar to that of Tamir Rice, in 2013, a sheriff’s deputy in Santa Rosa, California, killed 13-year-old Andy Lopez, who was carrying a toy pellet rifle.
The previous month, in February, five law enforcement officers in Moore, Oklahoma, beat and suffocated Luis Rodriguez to death. His last words, eerily, were, “I can’t breathe.”
One population that the prison system almost never entraps is police themselves. One thing I learned when I worked for Lowrider is that plea bargaining, which has virtually been refined to a science, effectively guarantees that law enforcement officers never serve a day in prison. Police officers who brutalize Black and Brown people often try to protect themselves from scrutiny or reprimand by charging their victims with felonies afterward. In court, district attorneys then offer to reduce the charges against victims of brutality to misdemeanors, permitting them to plead guilty and walk away with no time or time served. After the victims plead guilty rather than face the possibility of many years in prison, the officers who beat them incur virtually no risk of being brought up on charges or losing in the event of a lawsuit. Even if a victim were to emerge victorious in a lawsuit, none of the money awarded normally comes from the officers themselves.
As the Zapatistas have proclaimed in their struggle: “Never again a world without us.”
Killing Africa: William C. Anderson
Frantz Fanon once wrote: “In the colonies it is the policeman and the soldier who are the official, instituted go-betweens, the spokesmen of the settler and his rule of oppression.”
On March 1, 2015, a Black person identified as Charly “Africa” Leundeu Keunang was extrajudicially killed by police officers in downtown Los Angeles. A viral video of his death was circulating online before most people even had a name to identify him. Africa’s death is, of course, a great tragedy in itself. In addition, the video and the facts of his life suggest several important analogies of Black existence that reverberate alongside the echoes of that cadence of LAPD gun blasts. We know these things: The police killed Africa; he was homeless; Africa was living under a stolen identity; he was Cameroonian with ties to France; he was an immigrant.
Allow yourself to see the montage of Black intricacies in this slaying. Many of us can relate. The collage of identities and circumstances here expresses the reality of existence for many people of African descent. The police killed Africa—and furthermore, police in their many forms are killing and will continue killing Africans globally, through both outright violence and a refusal to address the ongoing, grievous harms caused by past violence. Many current tragedies—from economic crisis to climate change to internal war—fit the latter category. The death of the departed Africa exposes the brutal nature of our linked struggles. The police officer and the soldier are wreaking havoc on the African continent in the service of “development,” investment and military policy. Nations across the continent are experiencing rapid economic growth that does not benefit their populations as it should. Therefore, the term “emergent” has become a safe adjective to describe a continent that colonial powers, new and old, continue to try to whip into submission. “Emergence” is the notion that the interests of working-class and poor people can or will be secured along with the interests of nation-states who ultimately seek to profit off of them. Under this formulation of “development” and “emergence,” building capital within a neoliberal framework will supposedly result in better lives for people suffering within an oppressed sector of society.
No Black person is safe—certainly not Black children. We know this all too well in the United States, following the loss of Black youth like Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown and Aiyanna Jones. A blatant state-sanctioned disregard for Black children, though not fatal, was also illustrated in January 2015 in Kenya, when police attacked a group of schoolchildren who were protesting the removal of their playground. The space where children played was being cleared so a lot could be developed. The response of police equipped with riot gear, guns and dogs provided an all-too-clear illustration that when the gas clears, it’s still all about capital.
The entire world knows that Africa is wealthy in resources and people. The continent could fit several of the countries that exploit it most within its millions of square miles. Land grabs, development and foreign investment are instruments that new and old colonial powers are using to continue to subjugate Africa. The price is catastrophic: With every disaster that plagues the African continent, much of the world sees opportunities to insert itself into the homeland of the African diaspora. This has been the case for some time, dating back centuries to when Arabs first came into Africa, converting indigenous populations to Islam and taking captives. Now, whether it’s a Sierra Leonean woman being sold into slavery as a domestic worker in Kuwait or the forced removal of peoples in Ethiopia to feed the Gulf States’ and China’s fervor for farmland, Africa “belongs” to everyone except African people.
Say Her Name: What It Means to Center Black Women’s Experiences of Police Violence: Andrea J. Ritchie
Early one morning in July 2015, a new hashtag—#WhatHappenedtoSandraBland—popped up on Twitter. The question pertained to the death in police custody of a 28-year-old Black woman from Naperville, Illinois, shortly after her arrest in Prairie View, Texas, on July 10, 2015.2 Police claimed she committed suicide; her family is certain she did no such thing. They had spoken to her just hours before she was alleged to have taken her own life, discussing arrangements to post her bail. A few days later, a cop watcher’s video was released by Al Jazeera. You can hear Sandra Bland’s voice in the background crying: “You just slammed my head to the ground! Do you not even care about that?,” “I can’t hear!” and “I can’t even fucking feel my arm!” The video ends with Bland thanking the cop watcher for recording the incident as she is placed in a police car. Three days later she was dead.
Black Women’s Experiences of Driving While Black As Bland’s traffic stop demonstrates, “driving while Black” is a phenomenon experienced by Black women alongside Black men. Nationally, when traffic stop data is analyzed by both race and gender, researchers find that “for both men and women there is an identical pattern of stops by race/ethnicity.”
And in some jurisdictions, like Ferguson, Missouri, in 2013, more Black women drivers were stopped than any other group, including Black men.
For some women, driving while Black turns deadly, as it did for LaTanya Haggerty, who was killed during a traffic stop in Chicago in 1999; Kendra James, who was killed during a traffic stop in Oregon in 2003; and Malissa Williams, who was killed in Cleveland in 2015 after a police chase that also stemmed from an alleged failure to use a turn signal. Mya Hall, a Black transgender woman, took a wrong turn onto the campus of the National Security Agency just outside Baltimore, Maryland. She was shot by police as she was turning around and attempting to leave. Given no benefit of the doubt, no professional courtesy and no chance to explain herself, Hall had her life taken from her as though her Black life, like so many others, didn’t matter: a casualty of the presumption that transgender people of color are inherently violent and their lives inherently not valuable—and of the structural transphobic discrimination, violence and exclusion that ultimately placed Hall in police crosshairs. Hall’s death came just weeks before Baltimore erupted in outrage following the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, but was not centered in the Baltimore uprising that followed.
A few months before Sandra Bland’s death, Twitter lit up with posts tagged #McKinney. A police officer had violently assaulted a 14-year-old Black girl named Dajerria Becton in McKinney, Texas, in response to calls for removal of Black youth using a neighborhood pool. “He grabbed me, twisted my arm on my back and shoved me in the grass and started pulling the back of my braids,” Becton said. “I was telling him to get off me because my back was hurting bad.”26 Again, the officer’s conduct sparked local and national outrage. Again, the case was outrageous but not unusual. Every day police officers sexually harass, tase and assault young Black girls. Becton’s experience was not only reminiscent of Jim Crow–era policing of pools, beaches and lunch counters; it reflected historic and present-day patterns of gendered policing of race and borders—between communities and between countries.
Centering women and trans people’s experiences will also require movements against police violence to expand our analysis of state violence to include sexual assault by police, violence against pregnant and parenting women, policing of prostitution, deadly responses to domestic violence, and the routine violence and violation of police interactions with transgender and gender-nonconforming people.
Your Pregnancy May Subject You to Even More Law Enforcement Violence: Victoria Law
As calls to end police violence swept the nation during the summer of 2014, the New York City Police Department demonstrated that pregnancy is no protection against brutality. Sandra Amezquita was five months pregnant when police threw her, belly first, onto the ground. An officer straddled her body, adding his weight to the pressure, before handcuffing and arresting her. Her offense? Trying to stop them from harassing her 17-year-old son, who had been arrested for robbery the year before.
A member of El Grito de Sunset Park, a neighborhood police watchdog group, recorded the entire event and posted it online. The video sparked outcry and local protests, drawing attention to the fact that women—even women who are visibly pregnant—are not immune to police violence. That same summer, Idaho police shot and killed Jeanetta Riley, a pregnant mother of three who pulled a knife on her husband when he attempted to take her to the hospital after she had threatened suicide.
https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=660936530680965
The following morning, Venegas noticed blood in her urine and called for a nurse. A few hours later, she went into labor and was rushed to the delivery room. Her leg shackles were removed, but her left hand remained cuffed to the bed while she was given an emergency C-section. In the recovery room, the officer, who had left the room during her surgery, returned and shackled her legs again. According to Venegas, the nurse tried to dissuade him, arguing that the anesthesia prevented her from feeling, let alone moving, her legs. She was unsuccessful; the officer shackled Venegas. Venegas spent several days recovering in the hospital. Her baby was placed in the intensive care unit. Venegas was not allowed to call family members to tell them her whereabouts or that she had given birth. After not seeing her daughter in court for arraignment, Venegas’ mother called the precinct. Only then did she learn that her daughter had been taken to the hospital and had given birth. After Venegas was released from the hospital, she was immediately taken to the courthouse for arraignment. The judge set bail at $10,000. Unable to afford that sum, she was sent to Rikers Island where she spent one month before appearing in court again. This time, the charges against her were dismissed.
But her ordeal was not over. Three days after Venegas was released, her daughter was placed in foster care. Although Venegas had agreed to attend outpatient drug treatment, caseworkers told her that they would not give her the baby unless she went to a residential program. Fortunately, she found a program with an open slot and, six months later, was granted custody.
But shackling is only one form of law enforcement violence against pregnant women. “The combination of pregnancy and being held lengthy periods pre-trial can be incredibly dangerous,” said Diana Claitor, executive director of the Texas Jail Project, which advocates for improved conditions in the state’s 247 county jails. Claitor told Truthout that she receives numerous complaints about jail conditions from concerned family members. In one extreme case, Nicole Guerrero was five months pregnant when she was incarcerated at the Wichita County Jail for violating probation. After nine days, she noticed blood and other bodily fluids coming out of her vagina, then began experiencing contractions. A nurse told her that she was fine and had her returned to her cell, where her cries for help were ignored for hours. At 3:30 in the morning, Guerrero was taken to a different cell, where she gave birth on the floor. The baby died.
Purvi Patel was not as fortunate. In 2013, Patel arrived at an emergency room bleeding after an apparent miscarriage. She told hospital staff that she had miscarried but had dumped the fetal remains in the garbage. Staff contacted law enforcement, and Patel was charged with neglect of a dependent for allegedly giving birth to and abandoning a live newborn. The prosecutor also added a second charge contradictory to the first: feticide, for allegedly “knowingly terminat[ing] ... her own pregnancy by ingesting medication.”
Patel’s conservative Hindu background, in which premarital sex is frowned upon, as well as her text messages, in which she had expressed ambivalence about her pregnancy, became part of the investigation and subsequent trial. The state presented the results of a “lung float test,” a test in which lungs are placed in a container of water. If the lung floats, the test claims, it proves that the owner had breathed in air and had thus been alive. The test has been deemed unreliable for the past 100 years. In addition, the state’s own toxicologist admitted not finding evidence of abortifacients in Patel’s system. Nonetheless, a jury found her guilty on both charges. She was sentenced to 41 years in prison.
Black Parenting Matters: Raising Children in a World of Police Terror: Eisa Nefertari Ulen
My child’s breath is a freedom song. In. Out. In. Out. In. Out. The rhythmic pulse of air he powers is love, is life, is liberation. In. Out. In. Out. My child is breath. “I am here,” his body says with each inhalation. “I am alive,” his body offers with each exhalation. Each breath is a life force and each life force is a gift, is Holy. He is Divine. He is more than mere existence. He is complex sinew, meat, blood, mind, matter, running, laughing, playing, smiling, healthy. He is boy in motion, chasing balls, jumping rivers, leaping meadows, climbing trees. He is an idea made flesh. He is a rebellion. A riot. A rage against the machine.
At a Black Lives Matter protest my son sounded a call: “What do we want?” He also sang the response: “Justice.” The drumbeat of our fellow marchers punctuated this question: “When do we want it?” And he knew the answer: “Now.” My son is The Revolution. This is why: Twelve million to 20 million African people were stolen across the Middle Passage. About half did not survive the journey.
From 1882 to 1968, there were 3,446 recorded lynchings of Black people in the United States. That averages to about 40 people of African descent hanged, sliced, torched, drowned, beaten, or hacked each year.5 That averages to about three to four lynchings per month, which averages to, every week or so, one Black body lynched, one Black body clawed by white mobs. To survive this is to be a revolution, the inheritor of revolution. We are the children of those who survived. My husband, my son and I are their promise song. Because of them, we are here, and our survival is a revolutionary act.
From January 1, 2015, to May 30, 2015, at least 385 people have been shot and killed by police in the United States. This does not include the numbers of Americans killed while in police custody. Of the victims who were unarmed, about two-thirds were Black or Latino.
I fear more than police brutality. I also fear the lies that fuel police terror. I fear the systematic way stories about Black people’s encounters with the police are twisted and turned by the voice of the state. I fear the way the narrative is controlled by the state so that even our experiences do not belong to us.
Big Dreams and Bold Steps Toward a Police-Free Future: Rachel Herzing
In the 1990s, under the influence of Police Commissioner William Bratton, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) embraced CompStat, a data tracking and analysis system used to monitor incidences of “crime and disorder” precinct by precinct. This system is meant to track, in detail, crime complaints, arrests and summonses, with corresponding locations and times. The information from all the precincts in a jurisdiction is combined and used to generate a weekly report used in management meetings among departments’ leadership. Decreasing crime and increasing officer accountability were just two of the benefits CompStat was purported to have, and it represented a reform to the previous methods for documenting daily policing practices. CompStat has spread widely among law enforcement agencies across the county and the world, and has become one of the standard tools of modern police forces. And while advocates like William Bratton maintain that CompStat is crucial in decreasing crime rates, time has shown that these rates tend to initially decrease dramatically but then increase again. Time has also led to more and more cops coming forward to describe the coercion they felt to overreport or underreport certain types of incidents to generate particular kinds of CompStat results.
The accountability that CompStat was supposed to encourage among individual cops was supplanted by pressure to deliver the kinds of crime statistics desired by the city’s political leadership, including police chiefs and commissioners. At a time when crime rates were already falling in fairly predictable patterns across the country, police had to demonstrate their effectiveness and legitimize their role by continuing to prove that they were making contact with people who would do harm to residents if not for their intervention. In New York City, stop-and-frisk was one way that cops were able to demonstrate the power of these interventions. Before CompStat, cops had usually stopped and questioned people of whom they were suspicious and generally only searched them under reasonable suspicion of danger (usually involving suspicion of carrying a weapon). The broken windows orientation underlying Bratton’s mode of policing, which also extended to CompStat, suggested that the very presence of suspicious persons was a danger to the community. Through CompStat, the police could demonstrate that they were neutralizing that danger.
Soon, “stop and question” transitioned to “stop and question and frisk,” and eventually to stop-and-frisk. By 2011, the NYPD was doing over 684,000 street stops per year, nearly 90 percent of which resulted in no arrest or summons. These stops disproportionately targeted people of color (especially Black people), young people, homeless people, and queer and trans people. The depth and breadth of the physical and psychological harm done by the practice of stop-and-frisk ignited a citywide campaign to eliminate the practice and resulted in a lawsuit against the city based on the practice’s racial bias. While CompStat is still prized by departments across the country, the longer it is used, the more clearly the problems inherent in its use become evident.
The specialization of policing is another reform meant to reflect responsiveness to the changing needs of police forces and the residents they police. As modern policing has evolved, many forces created units to focus on specific areas of crime such as homicide, gangs or vice. One of the most notorious of these units is Special Weapons And Tactics (SWAT) teams. First used in the mid-1960s as small, elite units designed to respond to situations requiring paramilitary force and precision, SWAT and other paramilitary policing units have ceased to be the exception in policing and have become the rule. Roughly 90 percent of all police departments in cities with populations over 50,000 have some type of SWAT team, as do federal departments including the Department of Agriculture and the Department of Education. Additionally, SWAT teams routinely run training for new cops. They are used in a wide range of policing activities, from traffic stops to seeking informants to more high-impact policing. And although SWAT is a reform initiated from within law enforcement, its overwhelming expansion and mission creep are consistent with other forms of police specialization.
We Charge Genocide: The Emergence of a Movement: Asha Rosa, Monica Trinidad and Page May
Police violence is and always has been state-sanctioned violence. We must understand police violence to be rooted in historical and systemic anti-Blackness that seeks to control, contain and repress Black bodies through acts of repeated violence. As our delegation stated during our two-minute testimony before the US government during the civil society consultation in Geneva: There is no legitimate mechanism for pointing to the police as source of violence, and what that tells us is that violating our bodies does not count, that our safety does not matter. This narrative goes back to enslavement of Black people in the US, a history of Black Codes—laws that rendered Black people criminal for doing anything and nothing at all, to the state-sanctioned lynching and rape of Black bodies as spectacle and as sport. ... The US legal system has since functioned to uphold hierarchies and justify criminalization, police and punishment. ... We are in a perpetual state of crisis that cannot be fixed from within the system. We need a rethinking of how safety can be achieved. We need power to be shifted from y’all’s police to our people.
Heeding the Call: Black Women Fighting for Black Lives That Matter: Thandisizwe Chimurenga
“As a mother, I was concerned for the future of my children and my community, so I felt compelled,” said Melina Abdullah, a university professor of Pan-African Studies and an organizer with Black Lives Matter–Los Angeles. “I didn’t feel like it was a choice. It was a duty.”
Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson, a Chattanooga, Tennessee, organizer with Black Lives Matter, concurred. “I got involved in this movement because I felt required to fight for the lives of myself and my loved ones,” she said.
UCLA graduate student Shamell Bell said she had a “visceral reaction” to imagining her son victimized by the same state violence and anti-Black racism that killed Eric Garner and Michael Brown. “I simply could not theorize about systems of inequality as a student of African-American history and not put it to praxis,” she said.
Many of the people Truthout spoke with also have in common the view that what is currently happening is a movement, not a flash-in-the-pan event or a fad, which has also fueled their involvement. “My generation has been waiting for a moment like this, where the whole world seems to wake up all at the same time and pay attention to what we’ve been screaming for as long as we’ve had breath,” said Cat Brooks.
Oprah Winfrey has expressed her concerns that the current phase of activism appears to be leaderless and lacking in clear demands.2 Social media recorded a backlash of sorts against the media mogul, stressing that the leadership and coordination are present and accounted for, despite what Winfrey may think she has observed.
According to Ash-Lee Henderson, “We’re creating multitiered strategies with a diversity of tactics, including direct action and civil disobedience. ... Our movement is dynamic, and we are learning from and with each other how to do this work effectively, every day. Developing more and more leaders and organizers and activists, and we’re not going to stop.” As Ferguson activist and rapper Tef Poe put it, “This is not your grandparents’ civil rights movement.”
Our History and Our Dreams: Building Black and Native Solidarity: Kelly Hayes
Amid my readings on these events, I eventually came across a story that I had never heard before and have rarely heard discussed in the years since. Angela Davis, the Black freedom fighter and scholar who authored “Are Prisons Obsolete?,” actually traveled to the boundaries of the siege and attempted to join the Wounded Knee protesters. She was turned away by law enforcement at the town’s border as an “undesirable” person.
As I read of her attempt to join the resisters, I thought that Davis had to have known such a response from law enforcement was likely. She was already well-known and well-respected for her radical beliefs and aspirations, and was definitely viewed as a threat by the power structure. Then I thought about the threat of waning media attention, and it occurred to me: Showing up, by itself, was a defensive act. Davis used her prominence to create a news story, and for those living in struggle within the siege, visibility was life.
Black bodies have always been abused, controlled and subject to social death in order to facilitate their commodification. Even the 13th Amendment provided a loophole in the abolition of slavery, allowing the practice to continue within the US prison system. Thus, the Black Codes and the prison-industrial complex have allowed slavery to reinvent itself across the course of US history, just as displacement, forced relocation, the toxification of land, forced sterilization, and the intentional maintenance of poverty have allowed the government to continue to pursue its primary goal with regard to Native bodies: our total annihilation. Social, physical and political subjugation have always been the norm for both Black and Native peoples under this government. While the mechanisms of our respective genocides have always had different aims, both have been enforced by the same structures for the sake of colonial dominance, with horrific consequences.
A New Year’s Resolution: Don’t Call the Police: Mike Ludwig
Looking for a New Year’s resolution? If you haven’t found one already, there’s never been a better time to resolve not to call the cops. This resolution is more than a boycott or a political protest. It’s the beginning of a thought process and a dialogue, both internal and external, that challenges us to build new relationships with our friends, family and neighbors. It’s a spark in the imagination that leads us to dream about a free world. For those of us who weren’t already aware, the events of 2014 made it clear that the police do more harm than good, especially in communities of color. From the streets of Ferguson to Berkeley and New York City, people from all walks of life have been loudly resisting the power of police, who all too often prove themselves to be racist, armed and dangerous. At our rallies, we chant the names of the dead: Mike Brown, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner and countless others.
Some cops just bully people, but others kill, and the justice system lets them get away with it. In 2012, a study by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement found that police summarily executed more than 313 black people that year—an average of one every 28 hours.
This is not a new problem. Police routinely target certain people—particularly people of color (especially men) and gender-nonconforming people—for minor crimes such as drug possession or loitering, or for no crime at all, simply stopping them for “driving while Black” or “walking while woman.”
Last year, the American Civil Liberties Union found that Blacks were 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites, despite similar rates of drug use. In some counties, that number reaches 30 times higher.
Resolving not to call the police inspires us to consider the alternatives. Instead of calling the police to complain about a loud party at your neighbor’s house, you could address your neighbors directly, with the intent of having a constructive conversation about each other’s needs. Talking with our neighbors about taking responsibility for keeping our communities safe and happy helps us learn from each other and establish trust: the first steps toward building relationships that are strong enough to confront more complicated problems, such as bullying or domestic violence.
Violence is the most serious challenge. If you feel that your safety is threatened, and the best option to avoid being harmed is calling the police, you should do it. Resolving not to call the police is not a rule, just a way to think outside the box. Rules are for the cops, not for us.
There are, however, proven models for dealing with even difficult social issues without involving the police. One example: Police in cities arrest more people for drug offenses than for most other crimes,8 and a vast majority of all drug arrests are for possession, not sale or manufacturing. The harm reduction movement10 has effectively implemented many community-based strategies to reduce the harms caused by drug use while empowering drug users and non–drug users alike to work together toward healing and treating addiction.
Throwing people in jail for using drugs causes harm by seriously interrupting their lives, while at the same time reinforcing the stigma around drug use that drives people in need of help into the shadows. Harm reduction does the exact opposite.
Keep this world in your heart. Dream beyond the police.
Community Groups Work to Provide Emergency Medical Alternatives, Separate From Police: Candice Bernd
“People wanted to have first responders come when they needed 911, but the cops showing up there and cordoning off the scene, and actually stopping people from getting health care until cops were able to do what they wanted to do, was negatively impacting the community’s experience in passing moments of crisis,” Heaney said. Heaney says that once CR understood what the community wanted, she and other organizers reached out to street medics and health care workers of varying stripes, from emergency room doctors and nurses to local herbal healers. From their dialogue the idea of a medical cohort training was established.
In Eugene, Oregon, White Bird Clinic’s Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets (CAHOOTS) program5 is a mobile crisis-intervention service that shares a central dispatch with the Eugene Police Department (EPD) and is fully integrated into, and funded by, the City of Eugene’s public safety services. The service is dispatched through the city’s non-emergency police, fire and ambulance call center, but is designed to provide an alternative to law enforcement action whenever possible for cases of non-criminal drug and substance abuse, poverty-related issues and mental health crises.
A majority of CAHOOTS clients, about 60 percent, are homeless. The service was first created in 1989 as a collaboration between White Bird Clinic, a nonprofit social service organization, and the City of Eugene, to address the needs of the city’s homeless population and people living with addiction or chronic mental illness, among other marginalized groups. The CAHOOTS van dispatches between 11 a.m. and 3 a.m., seven days a week, with at least one nurse or EMT and one crisis worker who provide free first-response services to people experiencing a broad array of non-criminal crises. The CAHOOTS team can provide non-emergency medical care and basic first aid, as well as mental crisis intervention services, including case assessment, referral and advocacy.
CAHOOTS-trained teams also routinely provide counseling services, mediation in disputes and transportation to social services. “A lot of citizens that I think would otherwise not be calling and getting support ... because they’d be afraid of the type of responses they might get, I think feel more comfortable calling us because they know that we’re a human-service response,” said Benjamin Brubaker, a White Bird Clinic administrative staff member and CAHOOTS team crisis worker. “In most municipalities, you have police, fire, ambulance, and that’s what you’re going to get if you call 911 or a non-emergency number, and here in Eugene, we’ve been able to work with the local police department to build this kind of fourth human-service option.”
Brubaker said that the acronym CAHOOTS is the team’s tongue-in-cheek way of being up-front with the community about the fact that they partner with the EPD in certain situations. “We’re going to show up on the scene, maybe where the police are there,” Brubaker said. “But how that’s been broken down for the folks out on the streets, and how they kind of see that is: The police are there. They don’t really want the police to be there. They call us and we show up and say, ‘OK guys, we got this,’ and the police clear out.” Brubaker told Truthout that typically people call up the non-emergency police number, and the EPD determines whether or not the call is appropriate for a CAHOOTS team to handle. If it is, the EPD will dispatch the CAHOOTS van directly to a scene. But if the EPD determines there’s a criminal and/or dangerous element involved in a situation, many times they’ll respond first and have a CAHOOTS team staged nearby, or call a team later to take over for them.
Building Community Safety: Practical Steps Toward Liberatory Transformation: Ejeris Dixon
“Mom, when you were growing up, did you ever call the police?” “I can’t remember any time that we did.” “What did you do if something violent happened?” “It depended on the situation. Often we could send for the uncles, brothers, fathers or other family members of people involved to interrupt violence. However, there was this time when we had this family that lived on our block, where the husband was attacking his wife. And people were fed up, so some men in the community with standing—a minister, teacher, doctor, etc.—decided to intervene. Those men stopped by the house to let the husband know that they wouldn’t tolerate his behavior and it needed to stop.”
The process of building community safety poses some critical questions to our movements. What is the world that we want? How will we begin to define safety? How do we build the skills to address harm and violence? How do we create the trust needed for communities to rely on each other for mutual support? I’d like to offer some answers to these questions in the form of principles for building community safety strategies. By acting on these principles, everyone can take steps to decrease our reliance on police and prisons.
I’ve spent the last 10 years practicing verbal de-escalation strategies to address violence on the street, at events, and at actions and protests. I am constantly learning and growing. Every incident is different; sometimes I can reduce or defuse conflict, and other times I fail miserably. The strategies or tactics that work in one instance can go horribly wrong in others, even under similar conditions. Intervening in violence in the moment is inherently about using nonverbal communication to read, communicate, or negotiate safety. With each incident I tell myself that I am developing my instincts and that by practicing I learn, despite the outcome. We must practice community safety much as one practices an instrument or a sport: in slow, measurable and deliberate ways. Only by practicing can we build the knowledge we need to defuse and address conflict within our communities.
We can also learn a great deal if we are open to engaging with people who have different politics than we do. I left the S.O.S. Collective in 2010 because it was time for new leadership, and I was ready to continue learning in other settings. I took a job at a large LGBTQ anti-violence organization that wasn’t involved with transformative justice or community accountability work. I did this intentionally and deliberately, to see what I could learn from working outside my comfort zone.
I had the opportunity to refine my process, developing and presenting community-organizing options to recent survivors of violence and surviving family members. It was through this intense practice that I developed a process of rapid-response organizing in the aftermath of violence. I was able to use all the skills that I had developed while doing community safety campaigns and grow a deeper, more nuanced understanding of organizing around trauma. The ability to work with survivors of intimate partner violence, sexual violence, anti-LGBTQ violence and police violence was invaluable, as was my experience of working with survivors and organizers around the country. I also want to acknowledge that in these times, taking time to practice can feel like a luxury. The urgency is real. We are dying. As a Black queer woman, I live and love in communities of survivors. But we will not create, implement and achieve the measured and nuanced community safety systems we deserve through shoddy and rushed attempts. Instead we will collectively weave our stories into strategies based on sharing what worked and what failed. So my question to you is: What has kept you alive so far? What are the lessons and themes and patterns that you can draw from? How can you practice safety? Where can you deepen your knowledge? And what unlikely allies can you recruit as learning partners?