Again We re the Cops Do Not Tell Us Stuff Like This
In the backwash of the police force murder of George Floyd, protests erupted in Minneapolis and across the U.S., with activists and community members demanding that Black lives thing—and with many calling to defund the police.
Many of usa—especially white people—have been taught to equate policing with public safe and can't imagine alternatives to a punitive police enforcement model. Just our criminal legal system was congenital to reinforce deep structural racism in our society. For almost individuals and communities of color, policing has brought terror rather than safety.
The murders of George Floyd, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, Michael Brown, and countless other Blackness and Dark-brown people at the hands of law are not anomalies. They are evidence of a racist system that disproportionately targets people of color for violence, imprisonment, and expiry.
Tell your governor: Invest in our communities, not policing!
We need real modify. That's why we must cease investing in police and incarceration and instead intentionally invest in alternative models that are centered in customs and address the root causes of harm, in addition to making greater investments in schools, health intendance, and other human needs that keep our communities safe.
Here is why nosotros should all support the call to defund the police:
one. Policing in the U.S. was established to maintain white supremacy.
The law are not a neutral body, and the institution is inherently biased. In the U.South. slave patrols and nighttime watches were the beginning of a racially directed system of police enforcement designed to secure capital letter for white settlers.
Over the past 40 years, the expansion of racially targeted policing and policies such as cease-and-frisk and the "war on drugs" have helped fuel mass incarceration in the U.S., with African-Americans incarcerated at more than than 5 times the rate of white people. Black and Brown people are unduly targeted from a immature age, with hundreds of thousands of children ages half-dozen to 14 arrested, often by police officers stationed in schools as "schoolhouse resource officers."
Police forces have as well become more militarized. Since 1990, the federal regime has transferred $6 billion of excess military equipment to local police enforcement agencies under its 1033 Plan, giving police access to mine-resistant vehicles, assault rifles, and grenade launchers. For years police have also undergone "warrior training" that teaches them to come across every run across as potentially life-threatening, especially when those encounters involve people of color. Every year on-duty police impale an estimated one,000 people.
What's more, a recent study revealed that hundreds of active duty officers from across the state are members of racist and anti-government groups on Facebook.
2. Policing doesn't keep us safe.
Despite the billions of dollars spent every yr on policing, more than 15,000 people were killed by gun violence in 2019 lonely—unduly immature people of color. If policing and imprisonment stopped violence, the U.South. would be the most peaceful country in the world. But decades of bear witness show us this is not the case.
If we believe in everyone's right to live in condom and peace, we need to dismantle institutions that were never intended to get u.s.a. in that location— and complimentary up resource for solutions that are actually designed to create good for you, safety, sustainable communities.
iii. Torso cameras, trainings, and other so-called reform measures will non finish cycles of police violence.
In Minneapolis and other U.S. cities, body cameras and other reform measures were implemented as part of the Obama administration'due south multimillion-dollar response to the call for police accountability—and have proven largely ineffective.
- Body cams are regularly shut off past police and exercise not event in less trigger-happy beliefs—while increasing surveillance of those existence policed.
- Trainings on implicit bias for police force take shown no demonstrable result. In fact in Chicago, it was found that officers accused of abuses were leading the training.
- Community policing—the thought that if law and community work together, there will be more than trust in the law—doesn't piece of work, either. The exercise deputizes white and wealthy community members to surveille their neighbors, resulting in even more police actions based on racist attitudes and beliefs.
Meanwhile, police murders proceed, with 1,002 people shot and killed by police already this year.
4. Policing diverts billions of dollars from schools, wellness care, and other vital programs that need more funding to strengthen our communities and support shared well-being.
U.Southward. cities collectively spend $100 billion a twelvemonth on policing, while needed investments in didactics, health care, housing, and other critical programs go unfulfilled, particularly in poor communities and communities of colour. New York City, for instance, spends more on policing than information technology does on the Departments of Health, Homeless Services, Housing Preservation and Development, and Youth and Community Development combined.
Our taxation dollars must be reallocated from this arrangement that regularly murders Black people with impunity—and instead invested in programs that strengthen our communities.
5. Black organizers are calling for divestment from policing and investment in human needs across the land.
As role of its platform, the Move for Black Lives calls for the "reallocation of federal, state, and local government funds from "policing and incarceration to long-term strategies for education, restorative justice services, and employment programs."
In Chicago, the #NoCopAcademy campaign galvanized thousands of community members and garnered the support of more than 100 community organizations in urging the metropolis to shift funding for a new $95 one thousand thousand police academy to programs that do good youth and communities.
Faced with budget shortfalls and urgent health intendance needs—at least 13 cities accept made cuts to their constabulary budgets.
6. Our tax dollars should be invested in more than humane and only alternatives to policing.
That includes funding health care workers to respond to mental health emergencies—instead of the police. Information technology also means shifting our resources to transformative justice approaches that support survivors and work straight with the person who has caused harm through community-based systems of accountability. Under these models, customs members work together to keep each other safety.
The human costs of investing in policing—instead of our communities—take been social likewise as fiscal. We have created a society that looks to policing as the answer to our problems—both real and imagined—calling the police not just in emergencies, but also in response to white people's fears or annoyance in many situations where people of color are merely trying to live their lives.
Defunding police is one step we can take to free up resources and public imagination for more just and humane approaches to customs safety and shared well-being. It'due south time to defund the police force.
Tell your governor: Invest in our communities, not policing!
Source: https://www.afsc.org/blogs/news-and-commentary/6-reasons-why-its-time-to-defund-police
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