Transforming Community Safety: Looking Beyond Reforms
By Kourtney Nham • September 3, 2020
"Some people feel that abolition is about taking away, we feel that it's about transforming."
—Jasmine Williams, Black Organizing Project
I began my 2020 summer internship at The Praxis Project in the wake of mass mobilizations across the country and around the world demanding structural change and justice for the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Nina Pop, Tony McDade, and so many more. With my time as a Health Justice Communications intern at Praxis coinciding with a period of enormous national momentum around the issue of police violence, I have been reflecting deeply on the criminal legal system and community safety as social determinants of health, as well as how the radical demands to reimagine community safety being brought forth by abolitionists are necessary to advance health equity and liberation. I wrote this blog post to reflect on the importance of uplifting sustainable, abolitionist visions for community safety in lieu of reformist approaches that have been shown to be ineffective at challenging the lethal racism at the heart of violence perpetrated by the police and the prison-industrial complex (PIC) as a whole.
Black Organizing Project at Oakland Unified School District
As part of the process of writing this blog post, I had the honor of interviewing Jasmine Williams from Black Organizing Project (BOP), a Black member-led community organization in Oakland, CA working for racial, social, and economic justice through organizing and community-building, to learn more about their frontline work with regards to transforming community safety. This June, BOP and the Oakland community won a historic victory when Oakland Unified School District unanimously passed a resolution agreeing to eliminate its school police force. This resolution—named in honor of George Floyd—was the culmination of a decade long struggle to reimagine and transform school and community safety in Oakland. Though this blog post focuses on communities more broadly, I will be using BOP’s work in Oakland schools as an example throughout the piece. As Jasmine mentioned in our interview: “the same police in the streets are the same police in our schools, they're not different,” and since schools are integral parts of communities at large, BOP’s incredible work is an important example of how we can fight—and win—transformative demands for community safety that truly center those most impacted.
In the context of this moment, the passage of the George Floyd resolution in Oakland is not an isolated event: communities across the nation are championing demands to defund local police departments, remove cops from schools, and to sever ties between police departments and other public institutions, such as universities—and in many places, communities are winning. While violence committed by police on Black residents is not new, the nation's reckoning with anti-Black state-sanctioned violence (in the form of harassment, profiling, excessive and lethal use of force, and much more) this time around has amplified calls for radical upheaval of policing to a new level. Through the concerted efforts of abolitionist organizers and thinkers, demands for the abolition of policing and the PIC more generally have entered a broader social consciousness.
Nonetheless, the momentum behind transformative measures that shrink the scale or power of policing as steps towards abolition have also been accompanied by pushback in favor of a host of familiar liberal reformist demands. For example, body cameras have been uplifted as a means to ensure police accountability and transparency but have provided neither. Studies show that body cameras do not significantly impact officer's behavior or use of force. Public release of body camera footage for review is rare, with departments withholding video, conveniently losing files or deleting files after shifts, and failing to properly record at all. In the past year in New York City, the Civilian Complaint Review Board (the entity that investigates police abuse), stated it hadn't received requested footage for hundreds of cases. Implicit bias and de-escalation trainings are also high on the list of touted reforms despite the fact that there is no evidence that de-escalation trainings or implicit bias trainings are effective in reducing police use of force or removing biases engrained over lifetimes and generations. Atlanta PD officer Garrett Rolfe had undergone de-escalation and cultural competency training just months before he shot and killed Rayshard Brooks in mid-June while napping in his car in a parking lot. Other popular reforms such as chokehold bans and calls for more diverse police departments have also failed to mitigate police violence. Chokehold bans have been shown to be highly ineffective, unenforceable, and non-comprehensive in the cities where they already exist—the New York Police Department banned chokeholds in 1993, yet the ban did nothing to stop the murder of Eric Garner in 2014 or ebb the flow of complaints filed to the CCRB regarding the continued use of the "banned" technique. Additionally, diversifying police forces or forces featuring more Black officers, officers of color, or women officers do nothing but integrate marginalized people into the very systems and structures that oppress their communities. More racially diverse departments do not have significantly lower levels of police killings and do not lead to less racially biased policing, as evidenced by Baltimore's Police Department which has over 50% officers of color.
Communities disproportionately harmed by policing are well-acquainted with the failed promises of such reforms—they have been called for and implemented time and time again as solutions to police violence but have invariably fallen short of ending murders at the hands of the police. The reality of the continued failures of these reformist approaches is best put bluntly by abolitionist organizer and thinker Mariame Kaba: "Enough. We can’t reform the police. The only way to diminish police violence is to reduce contact between the public and the police." Simply put, none of the aforementioned reforms or ones of a similar vein reduce contact between the public and the police, meaningfully scale down policing's power and size, or do anything to address the systems and structures of oppression that place low-income, Black, and other highly impacted communities in more frequent contact with police in the first place. Most of these reforms only serve to legitimize police as arbiters of safety and funnel more resources and money into policing, diverting much needed funding for education, housing, food, and other social services that actually have the capacity to alter conditions of safety and health. As BOP and the Oakland community’s struggle has made evident, this trend of investment in punitive and carceral measures in lieu of funding the resources necessary for true safety and health is apparent in schools across the nation:
“Schools currently divest in the real supports that student and families need that actually create safe environments, things like mentors and health specialists, counselors, having activities like after school programs. Really resourcing schools creates safer environments. [Schools] over-invest in punitive discipline, like policing, surveillance, and security…We know that suspending and arresting students and sending them out of class are actually unsafe practices, they impact the psychological and physical health of youth.”
—Jasmine Williams, Black Organizing Project
On top of this, many Black, brown, Indigenous, migrant, low-income, disabled, trans, and queer people have never known police to bring about justice or safety. In fact, a look at the origins of police forces in the US as slave patrols and agents of Indigenous genocide speaks volumes about the institution’s allegiance to white supremacy and capitalism and its inability to be rehabilitated through reform. For this reason, Dr. Angela Davis cautions against trapping ourselves on "a treadmill of reform" and reminds us that we must, "...resist not only the institution but all the conditions and forces that enable the continued existence of the institution. We don’t simply add ‘humane’ to the name of an institution that is so flawed, so structurally racist, so profoundly influenced by heteropatriarchal ideologies…”
Along with being ineffective, Jasmine from BOP warns that “reforms can undermine [the] long term vision” and hinder the progression of demands for more radical change that communities are actually calling for. BOP’s fight for police free schools grappled with similar rhetoric in opposition of complete elimination of police in schools, with some folks positing what was needed was “more Black security officers or more brown security officers.” The underlying ideas that police equal safety and that police can remedy all of our social problems is core to these types of approaches, notions BOP constantly challenged in their campaign: “If we're talking about sanctuary for young people, why do we feel that these people who target Black people specifically need to be our "mentors" or "officer friendlies?"
BOP’s demands and similar abolitionist demands such as defunding the police (non-reformist reforms, as Critical Resistance calls them) do the opposite of these types of liberal reforms. They not only reduce the chance of police violence by decreasing contact with police but open up opportunities to fund services communities really need to thrive as well as counter dominant narratives that more policing and incarceration creates safety. Abolitionists recognize that abolition is just as much the construction and fostering of life-affirming structures and services as it is a deconstruction of carceral institutions. Communities are not safer with more police, but they are safer when people are fed, housed, healthy, and in relationship with others. For BOP, community safety is rooted in community connection: “a lot of the times the systems divide us… we find that through community building and grassroots organizing, we're able to put people together so that they can realize that they are fighting an issue together, that it’s not isolated, that they're not the only person that this is happening to. This idea of creating a community is how our people feel safe.”
In a moment when radical changes are gaining steam, reverting to band-aid policy reforms only serve to derail and co-opt the energy garnered by abolitionist efforts, by diverting attention away from calls for real radical transformation and providing authorities easy "outs" to placate growing unrest. The abolition of police in Oakland schools was not a reaction to George Floyd’s death, but the product of years of strategic organizing and truly listening to the needs of those most impacted in the community; from the beginning, “[BOP] never set out to do reform, because [their] vision was always clear for elimination.” With this, Jasmine from BOP reminds us that Black Organizing Project and community organizations like it, “have been working on this for forever, but even beyond that our ancestors and freedom fighters [have been doing this work], this is not a 50 year issue, this is hundreds and hundreds of years embedded into this country and into this world." Thus, in this crucial time, we cannot limit ourselves to paltry reforms that only seek to "improve policing's war" on communities but must listen and uplift the transformative work of people and organizations who have been laboring on these issues long before this summer. We are in place to embrace an entirely different conception of safety and justice, one that is not predicated on punishment, scarcity, and state violence, but rather one that is built on community interdependency, abundance, accountability, and the construction of truly democratic institutions that value human life—and organizations like BOP are showing us the way.