- Okay, it's my great honor to welcome you
to the 22nd Annual Rose Sheinberg Lecture.
I'm Sylvia Law, I teach
here at the law school,
and I'm chair of the Sheinberg Committee.
The Sheinberg Lecture was created
by Jill and Richard Sheinberg,
who are sitting right here in the front.
I think you guys have
been here every lecture.
I think that's true.
- Almost.
Almost, very close, and every lunch.
And Richard and Jill, apart from being
the founders of the Sheinberg program,
are lifelong advocates
for civil liberties,
racial justice, the environment, all kind,
Jill especially is a serious
political advocate in New York
and her home in Utah and the
world, and they had a relative,
Rose Sheinberg, who they wanted to honor.
And Richard went to NYU,
the LLM program and the J.D. program
and wanted to do something at NYU.
But they appreciated that NYU was not
as committed to social justice
across all different kinds
of lines as they were,
and so they wanted to create a structure
that would keep the program young.
And they had the following idea,
which has proven to be brilliant,
and that's that the program is run
by a self-perpetuating
committee of students.
And each year we select two 1Ls
who serve on the Sheinberg
Committee for three years
and do all the work involved
in organizing the program,
but most importantly pick the lecturers.
And if you look at the list of the folks
who have been prior
Rose Sheinberg Scholars,
it's very impressive.
And that's thanks to students
always having new ideas
about who they want to hear
from as they try to figure out
how to make their way in
the world as activists
for various social justice causes.
This year's committee members,
we also have faculty members.
Alina Das is not here
with us because she's,
I guess, getting someone outta jail,
but she'll be here soon.
She's a clinical faculty member.
Naomi Sunshine, former NYU student,
is now a lawyer and professor
and serves on the Sheinberg Committee.
The 3L students are Molly
Lauterback and Nina Sheth,
who unfortunately will leave us
because they're 3Ls (laughs).
The 2Ls are Claude
Heffron and Hugh Barron.
I think Hugh's not yet
here, but he will be.
And they picked our people for tonight
and put the thing together.
We also have co-sponsoring
organizations to thank.
They're listed in the program.
Our introducer tonight,
is somebody we fantasized
about as a Sheinberg
Lecturer for many years,
but she's come here actually
first as an introducer.
And we used to print
the list of introducers
but we've stopped doing it because we have
so many scholars it
doesn't fit in the program.
But the introducers are as impressive
as the lecturers themselves.
Irvashi Baud does work
that embodies the mission
of the Sheinberg program.
The Sheinberg program is
committed to integrating class,
race, gender, sexual
orientation in the struggle
for social justice.
And that's exactly what Baud
has been doing for over 30 years.
For over 30 years she's been a visionary
and an intellectual.
Imagining a world of
multiple identities based
on all those things.
Also imagining a world transformed
from systemic injustice
to human flourishing.
She's written two terrific
books that you should read.
If you're looking for some lite reading.
"Virtual Equality" in 1996 which won
the Stonewall prize for that year.
"Irresistible Revolution" in 2003.
Apart from being an
intellectual and a visionary,
Baud is a very concrete,
practical worker in the world.
She's a funder of social justice causes
an institution builder, an advocate
and she does all this in the
service of this larger vision.
So, it's my pleasure to welcome her
and she's going to
introduce Andrea Ritchie,
our main speaker.
Welcome.
(audience applauds)
- Good evening, good late
afternoon, whatever it is.
Thank you Professor Law and thank you all
for being here tonight.
It's my pleasure to
introduce the presenter of
this year's Rose Sheinberg
lecture, Andrea Ritchie.
I have a friend named Tim
Gill, who's a philanthropist
and a general good guy in Colorado
and he once observed that social movements
are like snowstorms.
In the aggregate they blanket everything,
transforming the landscape, producing
this kind of gorgeous picture
and avalanches of change.
But in the particular they're made up
of individual snowflakes,
each gorgeous each unique,
each contributing their own beauty
and symmetry to the whole.
Now social movement theorists
have attempted far less poetic,
supposedly objective models of movements
to understand the mechanisms
by which movements succeed or fail.
They argue that movements
rise out of combinations
of crisis and opportunity,
resources, immobilization,
that they're byproducts
of affective desires
for the assertion of
identity, for belonging,
against exclusion, that they're byproducts
of material conditions
constrained mostly by capital
and the limits of the possible
in government capitals.
But the snowflake theory
of social movements,
contributes something to
social movement theory
that traditional theories,
I think, underplay.
It foregrounds the individual
within the collective action.
It evocatively, for me, censors the power
of social movements in the right place.
Upon the scores and scores
of individuals each unique,
each compelling, each heroic,
whose actions together
become a force that causes
an avalanche of change.
Movements are comprised
of persistent actions
and relentless effort of
individuals and groups
of people who make things happen.
And tonight it's my honor to introduce
one such persistent hero
who has been at the forefront of movements
for police accountability
for over two decades.
Andrea Ritchie is a black lesbian leader,
attorney, human rights
expert, she's a writer
an advocate and organizer who's activism
has spanned courtrooms,
global human rights forums,
legislative and executive
branch policy making tables,
grassroots organizations and
a number of social movements.
Because of her original
and tireless initiative,
attention has finally begun to be paid
to the unique experience of black women
in their encounter with police
and law enforcement agencies.
I heard about Andrea and read her work
and saw the impact of
her leadership many years
before we had the
opportunity to work together.
She spoke at my class
in Columbia law school
in the fall of 2012 and at that time,
I asked her if she wanted to work together
on a project to put
criminal justice reform
on the agenda of the mainstream
LGBT movement in D.C.
It was nowhere near
that agenda at the time.
She immediately agreed and we embarked
on a multi-year project of
consultation and research,
of writing and organizing and convening.
That today results in the existence
of a major national advocacy
coalition that's called
the LGBT HIV Criminal
Justice Policy Working Group
we're just WONKS, so we
don't have a catchy acronym.
It's just total nerd land.
This coalition of over forty nerds,
I mean organizations,
simply would not exist
without Andrea's skillful
and substantial,
substantive contributions.
Andrea brings to each
engagement she undertakes
a formidable intellect, an
original conceptualization
and a deep and practice based
knowledge of public policy.
She brings the tenacity of a litigator
and the talent of a
brilliant coalition builder,
alongside her deep grounding
in civil and human rights law.
Ms. Ritchie graduated
from Cornell University
and received her JD from Howard
University School of Law.
She clerked for the
honorable Emmett G. Sullivan
at the U.S. District Court
for the District of Columbia.
In 2014 she was awarded a
Senior Soros Justice Fellowship
which she is currently on
and in which she is engaged
in documentation and
advocacy on the profiling
and policing of women of color;
trans and not trans, queer and not queer.
And she's working on the
writing of a new book
which were all very excited about.
Ms. Ritchie started working as
a police misconduct attorney
in the southern district
of New York in 2005
and continues to this day to
practice in impact litigation
and challenging police profiling
and brutality against women
and LGBTQ people of color.
She was lead counsel in Takun
versus city of New York,
a groundbreaking impact litigation
that challenged unlawful
searches of transgender people
in police custody and which
contributed to sweeping changes
in the New York Police
Department's policies
for its interactions
with LGBTQ New Yorkers.
She served as co-counsel
to the Center for Constitutional Rights
in Doe vs Jindal, a successful challenge
to Louisiana's crime against
nature by solicitation.
It's Louisiana's requirement
that individuals convicted
of crime against nature by solicitation,
register as sex offenders, crazy law.
She also served as co-council
in Doe vs. Caldwell.
Class action filed to
remove the individuals
who were on that registry in Louisiana
from that registry and
it resulted in a relief
for over 800 members of that class.
She's written and published extensively
on issues of police violence,
criminal justice reform,
and violence against women.
This year she co-authored
with Kimberle Crenshaw,
a widely-circulated analysis called
"Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality
Against Black Women".
Her groundbreaking book,
"Queer (In)Justice: The
Criminalization of LGBT People
in the United States" was
co-authored with Joey Mogul
and Kay Whitlock and
provided a unique analysis of
the way criminality and
criminalization is integral
to the LGBTQ experience
in the United States.
In 2014 she co-authored
with me and five others,
a publication called,
"A Roadmap for Change:
Federal Policy Recommendations
Addressing the
Criminalization of LGBT People
and People Living with HIV".
She's the author of a
chapter on law enforcement;
"Violence Against Women of Color",
and "The color of violence" anthology.
As a consultant she
produced a report called,
"Caught in the Net", a report
on women and the war on drugs,
which was published by the
ACLU in the Brennan Center.
She coauthored "Education
Not Deportation: Impacts
of New York City School Safety
Policies on Immigrant Youth."
which was published by Desis
Rising Up and Moving (DRUM).
And she's the author of
many law review articles
and other articles on
the issues of policing
and over-criminalization.
All of these achievements
on their own would be enough
but Andrea Ritchie's impact is evident
in three additional areas of work
that I'd like to briefly mention.
In focusing the attention
of global human rights
organizations on police misconduct,
in the organizing work
she's done on behalf
of LGBTQ youth sex workers
and LGBTQ people's experience
in police violence.
Her international human rights
experience is also extensive.
She served as researcher and co-author
for Amnesty International's report
"Stonewalled: Police Abuse and Misconduct
Against LGBT People in the United States".
She's a primary author of
"In the Shadows of the War on Terror:
Persistent Police Brutality
and Abuse in the US",
a report submitted on behalf of over
a hundred organizations to the
UN Committee Against Torture.
As a consultant to the
US Human Rights Network,
she coordinated the participation
of over 200 organizations
in the 2008 review of the
US Government's compliance
with the convention on the elimination
of racial discrimination.
Her organizing work has
resulted in the strengthening
and growth of the largest women
of color organization addressing
violence in this country,
INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence
on whose national collective
she served from 2003 to 2008.
Ms. Ritchie helped found and lead
a grassroots youth advocacy
organization called,
Streetwise and Safe, which organizes,
develops leadership and works to ensure
the safety of LGBT youth of color.
She served as it's executive
director for a number of years
and currently serves as
the organization's senior policy counsel.
And she also sits on
the steering committee
of Communities United for Police Reform.
These are just the highlights.
Imagine an even fuller resume,
which would require another
20 minutes to share with you.
There are few people that I know
who have done as much to build
the urgently needed movement
for police accountability,
for an end to violence against
women and trans people,
in general, and black women in particular.
Few people I know who
have been as effective
at promoting an
intersectional way of working
in everything that they do.
Please join me in welcoming
to the stage, Andrea Ritchie.
(applause)
- Wow, well, good evening.
I want to begin by
expressing my deep gratitude
to Professor Law and
the Sheinberg committee
for the incredible
privilege of being nominated
to give the Rose Sheinberg lecture.
Deeply humbled by the honor.
And by Irvashi, she's just,
gracious introduction.
I told her, "I'm going to
cry, so I can't speak",
but I'm trying to control that.
The reason is she's
been one of my Queeroes
since 1992, when I was a young activist
in Toronto just starting off in this work
and you know my 22
year-old's mind is blown
at this moment that I was just given
such a glowing introduction by Irvashi
and that also I've been
incredibly fortunate
to have had the opportunity
to work closely with her
over more than 20 years later.
So, I just can't thank you
enough for taking the time
out of what I know is
an incredibly busy day
because Irvashi makes magic
and has been making magic
at many levels in multiple places,
many of them particularly challenging,
as a lesbian of color to go
in and exercise leadership
and she paved the way for all
the work that I've been able
to do, with her hard work,
blood, sweat and tears.
So, I just really want to
appreciate and honor that.
So I'm gonna start tonight
off with a quick pop-quiz.
And the most important thing to know
is that there's no right or wrong answers.
It's just instructive
in helping us understand
how we think about issues
in profiling and policing.
It only works if you
go with the first thing
that pops into your head
and if you don't try
and think about what the best
or coolest answer might be
or the one that I might be looking for.
I'm going to ask you keep
your answers to yourself
and also ask you to take
care of yourself tonight
because I'm going to be talking
about a lot of violence,
including sexual violence at
times I'll be repeating slurs
that law enforcement
officers use to illustrate
the multiple things at operating
in the police interactions.
So, I definitely want to
give a trigger warning.
I won't be insulted if
you get up and walk out
or need to take a break.
So, you ready for this pop-quiz?
What is the first name
that comes to your mind
when I say police brutality?
(distant audience member reply)
(laughs)
That's unusual 'cause usually people think
of the subjects but that's excellent
that you thought of
the person responsible.
The answer to this tends
to be generational.
So, people of my generation
know about Rodney King,
whose beating by LAPD
officers after a traffic stop
was captured on video
and sparked an uprising,
not only across the
country, but one in Toronto
where I was living at the time.
And begin a conversation,
national conversation,
around police violence
that spanned a decade
and was sort of book-ended
by the police shooting
of Amadou Diallo here
in New York City during
a stop-and-frisk.
People who are younger than us might think
about Oscar Grant shot by Bart police,
by Eric Gardner, Michael
Brown, Freddie Gray.
Any of these names come to mind?
Or these?
And why not?
And how would knowing
their stories change how
we understand and act
around police violence?
For instance, how would
knowing Eleanor Bumper's story,
who was killed by New York
City Housing police in 1986
as they were trying to evict
her because she was less
than $100 behind on her rent,
have changed our understanding
of police violence.
Would we also be talking not
only about driving while black,
but also living while poor,
elderly, disabled and female.
These images are not so great
on the big screen, sorry.
Or the story of LaTanya
Haggerty, who was killed
the same year as Amadou
Diallo when, in her case,
her cell phone was mistaken for a gun,
in her case during a traffic
stop instead of a street stop.
Would that have changed
the way that we think
and talk about police
violence if her story
had claimed the same national
attention as Amadou Diallo's?
Many of us know about
Eric Garner being placed
in a chokehold, but just
weeks after that happened,
Roseanne Miller, who
was 5 months pregnant,
was also put in a chokehold
by a police officer,
also as a result of
broken windows policing.
The interaction started because she
was grilling on her front porch.
Grilling on your front porch
is apparently an offense
and that's where this
conversation started,
this interaction started.
So would we then understand not only
that broken window
policing can prove deadly
but that it also produces excessive force
against pregnant women.
Tanisha Anderson also died in 2014,
just a few months after Michael Brown
when her family called the
police to get assistance
while she was in a mental health crisis,
as people often do when they're
in mental health crises,
they get upset, particularly
when they're surrounded
by people in uniform
and in confined spaces
and in the course of her reaction to that,
the officers slammed
her head on the pavement
and killed her in front of her family.
Again, her case did not
get the same attention
as Michael Brown's.
And what would have
changed our understanding
of policing and police violence if it had?
And lastly, just weeks after, or before,
Freddie Gray's case rocked
Baltimore and the nation,
Maya Hall was killed, who
was a black trans woman,
was killed by a National
Security Agency police
for essentially taking a
wrong turn onto NSA property
and instead of being given
the benefit of the doubt,
she and her unarmed
passenger, were shot first
and asked questions later.
As if her black trans
life mattered no more
than Freddie Gray's life.
How would have that have
changed our understanding
of police violence if
her case had garnered
the same attention.
Next question, ready?
What is the first image that comes to mind
when I say police brutality?
For most folks, it's something like this
and the cop on top is white
and the person on the bottom
is a black or brown non-transgender,
generally not perceived to be queer man.
Maybe this week for you it's this.
Which is the assault
at Spring Valley High.
Or maybe for you, who
read an Associated Press
story about extensive
sexual misconduct uncovered
in a year-long investigation
by the Associated Press
which found that over
1,000 officers had lost
their license due to sexual
misconduct over a 5 year period.
Maybe you thought of this
guy, who was the focus
of the story, an officer
named Daniel Holtzclaw,
who stands accused and is
going to trial next week
for raping 13 black women.
Including 54 year old black grandmother
who was driving home from a domino game
and got pulled over in a traffic stop
and in the process was
forced to lift her shirt,
drop her pants and give him oral sex.
So those are things that when
we think of police violence,
we often don't think of police violence,
physical violence against black girls
and I've noticed in the
conversation around the assault
at Spring Valley High, very
quickly the conversation
has moved to our black
youth and how black youth
are policed in schools.
Whereas when black men
are assaulted by police,
we talk about black men being assaulted
by police as black men.
But in Spring Valley
High, we've gone quickly
from talking about, to
talking about black youth
and not talking about the way that gender
and race played out in that interaction.
We also don't often talk
about sexual violence.
We also don't talk about
physical violence experienced
by trans women, like Maya Hall and also
the women on the front of
that report to the left,
my client Jessica who, during the context
of a prostitution sting
was thrown to the ground
by a police officer and beaten severely
and then also subjected to
transphobic physical violence
and verbal abuse.
We also don't think about
the day-to-day indignities
and violence that happens
to transgender people
during police interactions when their ID
might not directly match
the gender that the officer
either perceives them to be expressing
or the gender they are expressing.
The demands for their real ID,
the demands for their real name
and the accusations of
fraud and criminality
that often follow.
The searches to assign
people genders based
on anatomical features,
the transphobic verbal
and physical abuse that
often happens during
those interactions, they're
not often the first things
that come to mind when we
talk about police violence
and we think about police violence.
As I mentioned earlier, the
first thing that doesn't come
to mind, doesn't first
come to mind, when we talk
about police violence is sexual assault.
Yet it's so pervasive
and so much of a problem
that the International
Association of Chiefs of Police
put out a report in 2011 that's
mentioned in that AP story
I talked about, which virtually no one
has done anything with.
You might be wondering
why there's a condom here.
It's there because
condoms are used as a tool
of racially gendered and
sexuality based profiling.
As in the case of a client
of mine, who was stopped
on her way to a McDonald's
just a few blocks from here
and the nine pound condoms,
New York City condoms,
mind you, New York City branded condoms,
handed out by the city, that
she was allegedly carrying
in her purse were used as evidence that
when walking on the way
to McDonald's she was,
in fact, loitering for
purposes of prostitution.
And that was basically the evidence they
had against her.
Now of course that doesn't
happen to everyone, right?
A white frat boy on
this side of 6th avenue
who had so many condoms in his pockets
they were literally falling out
would just be following
sound public health messaging
and perhaps be considered overly hopeful.
But not subjected to criminal prosecution.
It's an issue that
affects LGBTQ young people
in ways that we don't
often think or talk about.
And women of color, trans and not trans,
who are or perceived to be
involved in the sex trades.
And it's not only a question
of racial profiling,
it's also a question
of punishing perceived,
racialized gender deviants.
And so, often the condoms
might not be even used
as evidence, they're just
taken away and destroyed
and used as a tool of punishment.
And another quote that
was given by someone
who participated in the study, she said,
"Why do they take our
condoms away from us?
Do they want us to die?"
And that's the message that is being sent
by destroying condoms and punishing people
for carrying them.
Last question in our pop-quiz.
What is the first image that comes to mind
when I say violence against
women, or hate crimes?
Is it any of the things we
were just talking about?
And if not, why not?
Have we not just been talking
about violence against women?
Have we not just been
talking about homophobic
and transphobic violence?
But because it's committed
by police officers
it's not part of the
conversation that happens
and it needs to be.
It's the article that
Irvashi was referring to
where we started to make this argument.
So, the stories, and that's
what's been the basis
of my work for the last 20
years as described by Irvashi.
The stories I've just shared with you
are not isolated incidents or anomalies
in a pattern of police violence
that primarily targets black
and brown non-transgender men.
They are central, yet
often invisible points
in a systemic arc of police brutality
and state sanctioned
violence against black,
indigenous and women and queer people
of color since the first colonizing armies
and the advent of slave
patrols through systemic rape
and denial of reflective autonomy
and theft of children of indigenous
and African descended women
and the enforcement of
the nation's borders
on the bodies of immigrant women.
It's an arc that continues
through the lynchings
of Mary Turner, Laura Nelson,
and at least 200 other
black women documented
by Ida B. Wells.
Through the exclusion of Asian women
under anti-prostitution
laws from this land.
The beatings of Fannie Lou Hamer
and countless other black
women during Jim Crow
and civil rights eras.
And through the declaration
of the war on drugs
the emergence of broken windows policing
and the criminalization of poverty.
These stories also reflect a pattern
of systemic criminalization and punishment
of sexual and gender
nonconformity that facilitated
the colonization of
this land and proceeded,
continued alongside and extended beyond
the enactment, enforcement and
striking down of sodomy laws.
And before I go any further
I want to acknowledge
that police violence affects
black women's uniquely,
but not exclusively, obviously.
Indigenous women and two-spirit people
have been primary targets
of colonial, state and
police violence since 1492.
Asian women continue to
be routinely profiled
and subjected to discriminatory policing
of prostitution related
offenses specifically,
but also do experience physical
and often fatal police violence
as did Cau Bich Tran, a mother of two,
shot dead by San Jose police
who were within minutes
of responding to a call
for help at her home
in front of her son,
who's holding this sign.
Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern
and South Asian women
also suffer police profiling and violence
particularly in the context
of the war on terror.
This is Chaumtoli Huq, who
has written extensively
about her own experience of
basically being subjected
to this violence because
she was waiting outside
a Times Square restaurant for her family
to finish using the restroom.
Now, not coincidentally,
she'd just come from
a protest in support of Palestine
and had some theories about
what motivated this violence.
And Latinas like Jessie
Hernandez who was shot dead
by Denver police earlier this year
are clearly in the crosshairs
of police brutality.
With that said, today I'm
gonna focus primarily on
the experiences of black
women, both because
that's the community I'm
from and has been the focus
of my work for the past two decades.
But also, as a contribution
to the conversation
about anti-black racism
and state violence fueled
by the Black Lives Matter movement.
So, "Say Her Name", the
report I co-authored
with Kimberle Crenshaw highlights the ways
in which black women's
experiences of policing
are similar to those
of other black members
of black communities.
So for instance, when
we talk about the fact,
in New York City, that racial disparities
and stops and frisks are
identical among women
as they are for men.
So how many of you here had
heard about racial disparities
in stop and frisk in New York City?
And how many of you knew
that the rates were similar
for women as they were for men?
(laughs)
So, yes, that's something
that we've been trying
to raise through the report and beyond
as we now move into a process
of trying to figure out
what we need to do to address
these racial disparities.
It's something that we've been trying
to ask women's organizations to lift up.
And also, acknowledge that
mothers are as worried about
their daughters going out into the street
as they are about their sons.
"Driving while black" is
also a phenomenon experienced
by black women.
So for instance, in 2013
in Ferguson, Missouri,
black women experienced more traffic stops
than any other demographic,
including black men.
And of course, as we
all unfortunately know,
in the context of traffic stops,
black women like Sandra Bland
experienced police brutality routinely.
Traffic stops also
sometimes lead to unlawful,
racialized, degrading and
sometimes public strip searches
of black women, which is
the one that Brandy Hamilton
and Alexandria Randle were
subjected to on the side
of a Texas road by officers who claimed
to be looking for drugs.
Or the unlawful and
humiliating gender searches
to which black women,
gender non-conforming people
and transgender men, like Juan Evans,
are routinely subjected to by
police during traffic stops.
And women like Alesia Thomas,
who was kicked to death
in a police car and Natasha McKenna,
who was tased multiple
times while she was chained
to a chair and subjected to unspeakable
and deadly violence in police custody.
Five black women died in police custody
the same month as Sandra Bland did.
The war on drugs is the
context in which people
are generally most familiar
with women's experiences
of racial profiling and policing,
including strip searches,
cavity searches at airports,
street corners and jails.
Sometimes these experiences turn deadly,
as they did for Frankie
Perkins and Theresa Henderson,
both of whom were choked
to death by police
after being profiled for
allegedly swallowing drugs.
The feminization of poverty
has also placed black women
in the crosshairs of state violence,
whether it's Margaret
Mitchell, a black woman
who was shot by LAPD during
an interaction around
the shopping cart she
was using to transport
her belongings or Eleanore Bumpers.
The report also points out
that in addition to looking
more carefully for black
women's experiences
in the context of racial
profiling and police brutality,
if we expand our frame beyond physical
and fatal police violence
to include sexual harassment
and assault by police,
brutality in the context
of police responses to
violence or calls for help,
abuse of pregnant women and mothers
and policing of gender and sexuality,
black women's experiences
will come into sharper relief.
So, for instance, sexual
assault and harassment
by police is the second most
frequently reported form
of police misconduct
after excessive force.
But it's certainly not the
second most frequently talked
about form of police misconduct
after excessive force.
And it's one that disproportionately
affects black women
and women of color.
So, one study found that two
in five women in New York City,
two in five women of
color in New York City,
report sexual harassment by police.
Another found that nine
out of 10 black trans women
in New Orleans experienced
extortion of sexual conduct
by police in exchange
for alleged leniency.
So, young women of color,
low-income women, lesbian
and trans women, and women
who are or are perceived
to be involved in the drug or sex trades
are particularly targeted for
sexual violence by police.
In traffic stops, policing of prostitution
and responses to calls for help,
as well as explorer programs,
which seek to engage
young people in the work
of the police department,
are frequent sites
of sexual misconduct.
Yet there's no official data collection
and very few police
departments have any policy
or offer any training or
oversight on the subject
and there's rarely any
effective accountability.
Sexual assault can also take the form of
unlawful strip searches
and cavity searches
that are conducted simply
to degrade and dehumanize.
Used as a weapon of police brutality,
as was the case for Diane Von,
a Chicago public housing
resident who was terrorized
by police in an effort to
get her and other residents
out of their public housing
so it could be destroyed
as part of the process of gentrification.
Racial profiling in police
officers responses to black women
are obviously informed by stereotypes that
are deeply rooted in slavery.
Including those that frame
us as inherently promiscuous
and therefore more likely to be engaged
in prostitution related offenses.
So the policing a prostitution
is one of the primary sites
of racial disparity in policing of women
and queer people of color.
So, going back to this statute
that Irvashi briefly referenced earlier,
in Louisiana there was a
particularly egregious law called,
"Solicitation of Crimes Against Nature"
which basically criminalized offering oral
or anal sex for money.
So, you don't actually
have to do anything,
you just have to say, "I'll
give you a blow-job for $50."
That's why it's called
just a talking crime.
And that would be punished
with five years in prison.
And mandatory sex offender registration
for 15 years to life.
And that law was used almost exclusively
against poor black women
trans and not trans,
along with gay men, instead of
the regular prostitution statute,
which carried a much lower sentence;
it was always a misdemeanor
and never required sex
offender registration.
So, 80% of black women,
trans and not trans, who were
on the sex offender registry
were there as a result
of this crime and had to live
with sex offender emblazoned
across their driver's license
in all capital orange letters.
So, think of all the
places you show your ID.
When you go to the bank,
when you try and sign
your kid up for childcare,
when you order a drink at a bar,
and imagine having that emblazoned
on your driver's license.
They also were required
to notify their neighbors
of the offense in which they were charged,
as Irvashi was eluding to,
the crime of crimes against nature sounds
much worse and furthers
the projected deviance
of black women's sexuality.
So, as the work of
scholars like Cathy Cohen
and Dorothy Roberts emphasizes,
the sexuality of black
women has historically
been framed as inherently
deviant and to be controlled.
And as such, it is queered
in deeply racialized ways.
And so against this backdrop as the result
of the unfettered discretion
given to police officers
and prosecutors about which
crime to charge people with,
black women, queer and
straight, trans and not trans,
along with gay men, were
policed under this statute
as sexual deviants who
commit crimes against nature
by simply offering to
engage in sexual conduct
for compensation and
must be harshly punished.
So, as Irvashi mentioned,
in 2011 I filed a lawsuit
along with the Center for
Constitutional Rights challenging
the discriminatory impacts of the law.
And we appeared in front of a
judge who publicly proclaimed
that he was one of Sclea's
best friends and so that was
the first day we got there, we were like,
this is not gonna go well.
But it did, because he strictly construed
the equal protection
clause to see that there
were two categories
created, people convicted
of the same conduct under one statute
that carried one punishment
and another statute
that carried a different
punishment and the motivation
for both statutes was the same and there
was no rational basis for
the distinction between
the people convicted under both statutes.
I never thought you win in court,
up until that point,
I just filed lawsuits.
(laughing)
And you did, it was a moment.
Anyway, so as Irvashi
mentioned it resulted
in the removal of over 800 people
from the sex offender registry.
So, while the Louisiana law was unique,
there are many other prostitution,
this is there legal team
and I just want to lift up
the vision of Deon Heywood who was and is
the executive director
of Women with a Vision
in New Orleans and it was through
her tireless advocacy efforts
that the issue even came
to national attention.
And she made sure that
throughout our legal campaign
that the organizing campaign
also was foregrounded
and that the experiences and
voices and lives of the women
and gay men of color who
were directly impacted by
this were at the
forefront of our campaign.
So beyond the policing of prostitution,
policing of sex offenses
more broadly serves
often as a side of racially
discriminatory policing
and sex offender registries
represent an ongoing side
of discrimination and
punishment for sexual
and gender non-conformity.
So, for instance in 2010,
a grand jury indicted Antoinese Brown,
who was 18 at the time, an
18 year old black lesbian
in Portland, Oregon, she's
the person on the right,
my right, for sex abuse, luring a minor
and transmission of child pornography.
And that offense required
a sentence of six years
in prison and registration as
sex offender upon conviction.
Her crime, consensually
sexting with her girlfriend
who was 37 days shy of turning 18.
So, the case came to the
attention of the police
after her girlfriend's
mother, who didn't approve
of their relationship,
reported it to the police
but the police went
forward with the charges,
and so did the district
attorney and fearful
of steep prison sentences and
a lifetime sex offender
registration if she were
to be convicted, she
plead to luring a minor
and served 18 months in
jail, just for sending texts
to her girlfriend not
unlike texts I would submit
that at least half the people in this room
have sent to someone
at some point in time.
So, additionally we talk
and say her name about
how perceptions of black women as unworthy
and unfit mothers inform police violence
against pregnant women,
like Malaika Brooks,
who was shocked multiple
times with 50,000 volts
of electricity by police
tasers pointed directly
at her belly when she was
seven months pregnant,
during a traffic stop.
Fortunately her child was born healthy
but many other black
mothers and their children
have suffered from police violence
and it's particularly ironic
given that black women
are also often policed and criminalized
for not supposedly taking care of children
and using drugs while pregnant.
So when the police do it, it's all good.
And it shows the system
is basically set up
to criminalize black mothers
no matter which way they're going.
Indeed black women are
perceived by police both
to be inherently inviolable
and inherently violent
no matter what our circumstances are.
So, as a result, police
violence often occurs
in the context of police
responses to domestic violence
and it all too often proves
deadly to black women
and trans people like Janeisha Fonville,
who was killed earlier this year
in Charlotte, North Carolina
by police responding
to a dispute between
her and her girlfriend.
Or Aura Rosser who was killed
by Ann Arbor police
responding to an incident
of domestic violence.
And reliance on police as first responders
to people in mental health
crisis frequently results
in further brutality, as I
described with Taneisha Anderson,
but also for Kayla Moore,
who was a black trans woman,
who was killed by Berkeley police
who were supposedly responding
to a request for assistance.
She was perfectly calm when they arrived
but instead of offering her
the help that she needed
the officers decided to
arrest her on a warrant
for a person who had the same name
that she was assigned at birth,
but who was 20 years older than her.
And she died as police
piled on top of her trying
to effectuate this arrest and
then refused to give her CPR
because she was trans.
Transgender and gender
non-conforming black women
routinely experience profiling, homophobic
and transphobic harassment and abuse,
as was also the case for Dewana Johnson,
who like so many black
women, including, of course,
black trans women, was
profiled for prostitution
as she was walking down the street
in Memphis and arrested.
She was then brutally
beaten in the police station
because she wouldn't answer
when a police officer called
her over to be fingerprinted
by calling her a faggot.
She said, "That's not the
name my mother gave me.
And that's not the name I gave myself."
And as punishment, she
was brutally beaten,
it was caught on video,
but that didn't spark
a national outrage in the same way
that other video taped police violence
has sparked a national outrage.
So, beyond the direct
policing of gender lines,
evidenced by cases like Dewana's,
racialized policing of gender
and sexuality continues
to take place on a daily basis,
even as laws that are
discriminatory on their face,
whether it's a sumptuary law
or a common nightwalker law
or a sodomy law, are struck down.
Because ultimately police don't
just enforce discriminatory
laws that can be challenged,
changed or repealed, they
make law, every single day,
in the context of countless routine
and mundane interactions.
When they determine what
constitutes reasonable suspicion
to stop someone, what constitutes
probable cause to arrest,
who's suspect, who's credible,
who belongs, who doesn't,
whose presence signals
disorder and whose does not,
and whose conduct is
scrutinized and whose to ignore.
And these acts of law making hidden
within discretionary police functions
are deeply informed by
controlling narratives dictating
how individuals behavior will be perceived
through racialized, gendered
and sexuality based lenses.
And that operate in service
of maintaining systemic
relations of power.
In "Queer (In)Justice" we
describe these narratives
as criminalizing archetyped.
Systemically in trans stories
that literally control
how we see and understand
the same behavior
when different people engage in it.
Whether it's standing on a
corner, carrying a condom,
or calling for help.
And the kinds of
discriminatory decision making
the archetypes drive, is
often invisible to the law
and thus not susceptible to
challenge in the same ways
as other forms of explicit race
and gender and sexuality
based discrimination.
And this broken windows policing paradigm,
which originated here in New York City
and has since spread like wildfire across
the country facilitates
this racialized policing
of gender and sexuality.
Because broken windows
theory is based on the notion
that leaving signs of disorder,
like broken windows unattended will
inevitably lead entire
communities to immediately descend
into violence and mayhem.
The theory, which is without
any scientific basis,
and was later disavowed
by one of it's proponents,
later evolved to also posit
that punishing low-level offenders,
such as someone maybe jumping a turnstyle,
will prevent these individuals
from evolving into mass murderers.
Again, without any scientific basis.
And perhaps more disturbingly, the article
in which broken windows
theory is premised,
explicitly names the public
presence of particular types
of people; youth, homeless
people, people perceived
to be engaged in prostitution,
and unattached adults,
reinforcing hetero-patriarchal notions
of who's a good citizen and who's not,
as embodied signs of disorder
that must be rooted out.
And the precursors to the
article are much more blatant
in whom their naming as
the signs of disorder
in terms of their racial
and gender make up.
It says, young black men, young
women in shorts hanging out
on corners, interracial
couples and gay people
are signs of disorder.
So implementation of
broken windows policing
is characterized by
proliferation and aggressive
and discriminatory enforcement
of so-called quality
of life regulations.
Which criminalize an
ever-expanding range of activities
in public spaces including
standing, sitting, lying,
sleeping, eating, drinking,
urinating, littering,
making noise, approaching
strangers and also a number
of more vague things
like disorderly conduct
or lewd conduct.
Making it very difficult
to exist in public spaces
without potentially being
charged with breaking one.
So broken windows
policing has given police
an almost unlimited power to stop, ticket,
and arrest dramatically
increasing the frequency
and intensity of police interactions with
the targets named in the
policy; youth of color,
low-income and homeless people,
public housing residents,
people engaged in street-based
survival economies,
street vendors and frankly anyone else
who may be hyper-visible in public spaces,
including trans and gender
non-conforming people.
So in this structural context,
so it's a structural relationship of power
that is manifest through
the operation of these laws,
and then individual
officers act on perceptions
that informed by controlling narratives
that basically frame women
and queer people of color
as literally embodying a
racialized and sexualized disorder.
Which often translates directly
into cops literally walking
up to black trans women
and giving them a ticket
for disorderly conduct.
Or walking up to queer youth of color
in the West Village and
giving them a ticket
for unreasonable noise.
Or charging a woman of color out
at night wearing short
shorts with loitering
for the purposes of prostitution simply
for being present in a public place.
And so further ways in which this operates
is that archetypes of
gender non-conforming people
as inherently violent and deviant,
lead gender non-conforming young women,
for instance, to be
profiled as gang members
and gay and gender
non-conforming men to be profiled
for lewd conduct in public
bathrooms and public parks,
from Port Authority to Jackson Heights.
In those cases, based on
narratives framing men of color
and particularly queer
men, as hyper-sexual,
uncontrolled manifestations
of sexual deviants.
So the challenge then
is not only to identify
the laws and policing
practices that facilitate
this racialized policing
of gender and sexuality,
but also to surface the ways
in which policing produces
race, gender, sexuality
and poverty based classifications
in the enforcement
of facially neutral statutes.
And to look at how those
classifications are rooted
in racialized, gendered, transphobic
and heteronormative understandings
of acceptable behavior,
gender presentation and
expression, which take place
in daily police interactions.
And which are both frequently invisible
and impervious to 4th and
14th amendment challenges.
Yet they're no less
invidious in their impact.
But their impacts are routinely
deemed to be deminimis
or reasonable under 4th
amendment jurisprudence
in after-the-fact
determinations made by courts
which are ultimately informed by
the same controlling
narratives that produce
the misconduct in the first place.
And in the absence of de jure distinctions
or evidence of intentional discrimination,
discriminatory decisions
about whose conduct
is to be punished and
how are all too often
to be deemed beyond the purview
of the equal protection clause.
As a result, many of the consequences
of broken windows policing,
ranging from daily indignities
to death, are not cognizable at law.
So what would it mean to
center these narratives,
these experiences and
realities in our movements
for police accountability?
Might mean different names on tee shirts.
Different images.
Might mean different memes.
Or different subjects of organizing.
That's Ricky Aboyd,
sorry, that's the brother
of Ricky Aboyd, a black woman
killed by Chicago police.
So, "Say Her Name" was released
on the eve of a national day
of action to end state
violence against black women
and girls called by
BYP100, Black Lives Matter
and Ferguson Action, to
which over 30 communities
across the country responded with vigils,
direct actions and protests.
That's the action that
happened in New York City
at the African burial ground.
Where we honored the
history of police violence
against black women and
then went to city hall
to protest it's ongoing manifestations.
It's a vigil in Union Square,
bringing together family members,
that's Kayla Moore's sister Maria Moore,
bringing together family
members of people,
of black women, who have
been lost to police violence.
Who don't often get
lifted up in the same way
as the families of black men.
People took over places where
black women had been killed.
People made historical connections.
And people lifted up their own experiences
and those of women in their community.
Demanding justice for people
like Janeisha Fonville.
And standing in the
legacy of Assata Shakur.
In over 30 cities people did light actions
after Sandra Bland was
killed later this year.
But of course, it's not
enough to just say her name.
Black women's experiences with profiling
and policing must drive our analysis,
our advocacy agendas and our organizing.
For example, earlier this
year over 75 women's groups,
anti-violence organizations
and criminal justice advocates signed on
to a submission to the
President's task force
on 21st century policing.
There was a picture of the
cover of the report there
but not anymore.
And the submission highlighted
women's experiences
in outlining an agenda for police reform
that is both gender
specific and inclusive.
And similarly, a group of
LGBTQ organizations developed
and submitted a shared
policy agenda that was rooted
in the "Roadmap for Change"
report that Irvashi referred
to in that, I had the
privilege of co-authoring
with her and others.
There we go, the task
force adopted a number
of key recommendations
and we're now pushing
towards implementation.
For instance, recommendations
that would require documentation
and action around police sexual assault
that was highlighted by
the AP article this week.
But ultimately embodying the
principle that black women
and queer and trans people's
lives matter requires more
than expanding an agenda
for criminal justice reform
to include policy changes that
will address our experiences.
Our experiences of
punishment and death rather
than protection at the
hands of the police,
as I submit not the
product of a few bad apples
or susceptible to reform, it's intrinsic
to the system itself.
And this knowledge requires
us to radically reimagine
our visions of safety.
To collectively imagine
strategies and institutions
that will not facilitate
and further the policing
of gendered sexuality in
the service of policing race
and poverty, but instead
truly promote safety
from all forms of violence,
including police violence.
For all members of our communities.
And it requires us to
fundamentally shift relations
of power in ways that the law,
which is set up to
reinforce them, cannot do.
So, what would it take
to end state violence
against black women and girls?
What would it take to act in a way
that is consistent with
the inalienable fact
that black women's lives matter?
How would this change
the national conversation
around racial profiling
and police violence?
I look forward to tackling those questions
with you all in the next 30 minutes.
Thank you.
(applause)
- [Irvashi] The people who have questions,
you go to the mic, please,
we're recording this.
- Can I actually ask
that the first question
come from a person of
color, preferably a woman
or a person who's queer and trans?
I mean, I don't wanna
put anyone on the spot.
If you don't wanna ask, then go ahead
but I wanna make that space--
- [Lanae] Well, I'll go first.
(laughs)
- [Irvashi] Thank you.
You wanna go to the mic.
- [Lanae] Oh, okay.
Hi.
- Hi.
- [Lanae] My name is Lanae.
I just wanted to say thank you so much
just for being here and sharing your work
that you have done for 20 years.
I really, as a woman of color,
I just wanted to say thanks
so much for what you've done.
And my question is, what is the next step?
Is there a new report comin' out?
What other, oh my god the
words is not comin' to me.
What can we do as people in this room,
to push forward Black
Lives Matter and Sarah Nay?
- Thank you and I
appreciate your appreciation
and also want to say
that I do this for myself
and for my communities and for all of us
because all of our
liberation is bound together
I do it because we're targeted
and we need to do it together.
I think that's the question
is what's the next step.
I think we've maybe turned
a corner after the last
however long of trying
to raise the visibility
of women's experiences and queer
and trans people's experiences
with police violence
but what happens beyond visibility
and I think definitely
engaging in harm reduction.
So yes should we come up with a policy
that cops can't tase pregnant women,
sure that would be really
good harm reduction
and then we can make sure it was enforced.
But then, also, what's
beyond that is where
I'm most interested because
I think that ultimately
we need to find a way to decrease,
eliminate police interactions altogether
and that requires us to do a
kind of radical reimagining
that I was mentioning and I
wish I had a checklist for you,
a ten point checklist because
then I would just do it
with, hopefully, a group of people.
I think that's the struggle,
that's the challenge
and that's where all of
our creative imaginations
are gonna be required.
So, there are groups out there,
like Creative Interventions
for instance, who have
put out toolkits about
how to intervene in violence
without involving the police,
there are groups like
the Audre Lorde Project
and Safe Outside the
System who have been trying
to figure out what's a
community based response
not just interpersonal
violence, but also to homophobic
and transphobic violence on the street.
And in response to police violence
that produces real accountability.
And I think that's where we need to go.
And then I was challenged earlier today
to also think more deeply,
and this is far beyond the police,
the police are just a manifestation
of the systemic relations
of power in our society
and they're the most,
the reason I work here
is because I feel like
that's the front line,
most violent enforcement of it
and if I can keep people out
of this system at the front end
then that's where I can
put my skills to use
for harm reduction but I
really hope and support
and believe and urge folks
and wanna be as part of
and supporting as much as
possible shifting the relations
of power in our society such
that we don't produce police,
we produce police like people,
we don't produce the kind
of systemic instructors of
violence that they represent.
So, I wish I had a ten-point plan for you,
but we're gonna have to build it together.
- [Lanae] All right, thank you.
- Thank you.
- [Scott] My name is Scott Caplin,
I'm the police misconduct
and corruption officer
of the Jim Owles Liberal Democratic Club
and Progressive Citywide LGBT Club
I'm also an activist with
the Police Reform Organizing Project.
My question is what do you make
of the self-proclaimed progressive mayor
of New York City who was elected
on a police reform agenda continuing
to defend broken windows policing
and who's first appointment was
that of the broken windows
police commissioner
of Rudy Giuliani?
- Disappointing to say
the least, but also,
I think it's also
instructive and revelatory about again,
the challenge of
challenging systemic things
through the electoral process and counting
on individuals to produce
change to systems.
I think that hiring Bratton
exposed something pretty quickly
about what was happening in
New York City post de Blasio,
I just don't know that any police chief
would be that much different.
I think he's just the
one who was here before
doing the bad things before that we know
(laughs) and who has been an architect
of this paradigm but he's certainly not
the only one doing it,
so I think we're looking
at an institutional problem
that we need to tackle
beyond hopes for one
mayor or one police chief.
- [Lanea] Hi, sorry I feel bad
'cause I already asked questions, but, so,
my question is, what do you imagine is
one of the more common
ways that the visibility
of the violence against
women and queer people
will be co-opted, because
I think that something
that always tends to happen
and I think a lot of times
we can, I don't know, I feel
like it's not always easy
to tell when the mainstream
whatever you wanna call it
begins to adopt and take a narrative.
So, thinking about the
rise of certain kinds
of trans visibility in the past year,
I'm wondering what you think
that's going to look like
in this particular context.
- Well, there's so many
gifts and blessings
about being a part of this lecture series
but I've found that the
conversations I've had
with y'all today have
been the greatest of them
because I hadn't thought about.
I was so like, "Oh, we
just go here", right?
I think that the ways
in which it might happen
are trying to split us off from
the rest of our communities
and then continuing this
sort of like good, bad dynamic, right?
So I think, for instance, with people who
have experienced police sexual assault,
I think one way the
mainstream could co-op that
is be like, these are the good people
who have experienced, it's
clearly police violence,
and then we're just gonna
take this as not part
of a continuum of things
that are happening
to an entire community
and not as one weapon
among many of police
violence, we're gonna say
it's some unique and strange
thing that we're gonna deal
with, buy there's really
they can come up with, right?
There's no, they can't be
like, "Well, excessive force
was required in this moment
because..." whatever,
there's no legitimate
basis for sexual assault.
And so, I think that's
one way they might try
and cut it off and I think that AP article
was great and also signaled
this is an area that
we're gonna go hard in and
then we're gonna forget
it's connection to, for
instance, gender searches
or to the kinds of body
cavity searches and searches
that people experience as sexual assault
that happen to black and
brown women everyday.
So, I think that's one
way and I think also
we're already seeing it in the assault
at Spring Valley High, right?
As long as we can establish
that the woman was good
and innocent or the queer
person was good and innocent
then we'll go with that, but
as soon as we can find one iota
of resistance or one hook
on which to criminalize
the whole person, then
we're gonna go there.
I feel like that
conversation happened a bit
with Sandra Bland too, right?
She was in college, she's a graduate
and she was going to her job and whatever,
but then I think people were like,
"But she didn't do exactly
what the officer said"
so we're gonna, and then
she had this criminal thing,
so I feel like that kind
of co-option is something
that happens a lot in the movement.
I think it's gonna happen
to us as women too.
And I think sometimes I despair of
how people sometimes talk
about police violence
against trans women of color again
as if it's some exotic category of people
that experience policing
separate from how policing
is experienced in the community
and instead of seeing it
as people who are standing
at the intersections of
multiple axis of police violence
and structural violence and instead trying
to take trans women of color
out of the conversation
that's happening more
broadly around policing.
I think that's one way people
might try to co-opt it also.
I feel like mainstream LGBT
groups particularly might try
and go there and not pick
up the entire process
and then also only go for
people who are being profiled
as being engaged in something
as opposed to people
who are actually engaging in something
is another way it could go.
There's lots of ways it could go.
We'll have to think about
that 'cause it's important
to think about it to be
ahead of it, so thanks.
- [Female] Thank you so
much for coming today.
So, I have a lot of disparate
thoughts but something
that I'll start with is, I
thought it was really interesting
that you said, "Our
liberation is bound together"
and that's something
that really speaks to me,
especially being a law student
in a professional school
and I wonder how you see these
unequal power structures
reproducing themselves
in settings like this and
how lawyers can address them
and rebel against them and
what do we do about that,
like, what are they, where
do we see them specifically,
is it the money that I'm
paying for my textbooks,
is it student loans, what is
it and how do we fight that?
And then my second question
is, I'm curious about
your cultural observations
of our generation
and the trust that we seem
to have in state institutions
and I noticed that in particular after
the WikiLeaks information
came out, Edward Snowden,
working on the rendition
works of CIA, rendition war
on terror stuff, there seems
to be an overwhelming trust
in US Government, and maybe
not in this community,
but that's sort of the
impression that I get
from the American public at large,
and that is why guilt and
innocence I think matter
so much in these narratives.
And I was wondering if
you could speak about
that a little bit, 'cause
I feel like sometimes
in activism on torture we
have to make it palatable
to policy makers even though the crimes
and the violence is not palatable at all.
So I was wondering if you
could comment on that.
- In terms of the ways
in which these structures
are manifesting in law school,
you guys are the experts
on that, you're living with it every day,
it's been a minute since
I was at law school,
but I do know, for instance,
that I had a legal intern
who was working with me at
one point, who was Korean,
and she was standing outside
the Manhattan Criminal Court
as an intern waiting to
meet one of our clients
and in the course of standing
there for five minutes,
she was profiled by a police
officer as being engaged
in prostitution, by a court
officer as being engaged
in prostitution and by the public defender
as having been engaged
in prostitution and being
a defender in the court.
So, I think as law
students, you're also living
in the community and you're
experiencing that violence.
I think we've seen a lot
of cases of police violence
on campuses, including
law school campuses,
including targeting professors,
including law school professors,
so I think that there's
lots of examples there.
All kinds of people come to law school,
we don't all come with privilege,
and we're all experiencing
the kinds of structural violence
that we're talking about
and some of us come from
organizing backgrounds.
And I think, yeah, law
school is set up to reproduce
the systems that we're talking about.
I think that many of use come
to law school in the hope
of learning enough about
the system to help reduce
it's harm, or learning
enough about the system
to strike back at it in a particular way
or yeah, so I think that,
but for the most part
it's structured in ways that reproduce
the systems outside of it.
To your second question
which was about, remind me?
- [Female] I guess it's more about,
I have this idea of organizing--
(interference interrupts speech)
So I guess I just wonder,
I feel like there's
so much violence that happens--
(interference interrupts speech)
- Well I think you also
asked about trusting
the US Government, yes, I think that's why
I forgot it 'cause I was perplexed,
'cause I don't actually
hang out in any circles
where anybody trusts the US Government.
(laughs)
So, I was like, I don't
know where that would be.
But I agree with you, in terms of
this generation particularly, I think
I've heard more distrust of
any governmental institution,
certainly in those
circles I hang out with,
that's the reason I say, I don't know of
any (laughs) people
there who have a lot of,
I mean it's not true,
people do wonder what we
would do without police and
have concerns about that,
but at the same time, don't
trust people to preserve
their safety and also distrust,
with excellent reasons,
other institutions that are deemed
to be helping institutions,
like social service agencies or whatever.
So I think from one way in which things
are playing out now is that there's
an increasing trend toward saying,
"Well, maybe police shouldn't
be the one's responding
to mental health crises,
maybe social services agencies
should be, maybe we should
divert people from prison
for prostitution related
offenses to mandated counseling
or mandatory participation
in a resume building program.
And I think what people are
seeing in those institutions
is similar patterns of policing happening,
not to mention that the
police are also often present
in those places, like they
are in welfare offices
and public hospitals, so
that if you don't comply,
literally, with your
social service mandate,
then you get policed and punished
in kind of the same ways.
So I think people also
have healthy distrust
of those other institutions as well.
And I think that the answer
that we hear loud and clear
in Streetwise and Safe is, young
people know what they want,
young people know what they
need, listen to young people,
don't tell them what they need.
(laughs) You know, and
I think that's a message
that I'm in charge with
taking out to the world
around all of these institutions.
And so, I've seen that distress,
in terms of technology,
yeah, I don't trust body cameras,
I think that's maybe one
technology that people
are advancing as an answer.
I think on the one hand yes, I've been in,
I've represented people in criminal cases
where the cop has concocted
this fantastical story of
this young black woman,
who was a client of mine,
who jumped on the back of
a 200 pound police officer
and physically assaulted him
and then you just hit play
on this screen and it's like,
that's not what happened, right?
So I feel like I've seen
the good parts of that,
but then also there's ways
in which it's not helpful
and can be harmful.
But I think most young people
I know in your generation
have a healthy distrust of that too.
You're right, I go
sometimes in other places
and I realize that the rest of the world
does not feel the same as
the world I circulate in.
I think more and more I'm
hearing people not have trust.
I think Black Lives Matter
has really had a huge impact
and I was recently at a
conference at a law school
and people were talking
about abolishing the police,
like the law professors
were talking and I was like,
"Well that's not a
conversation I usually hear
from these people" and I
think a judge was saying,
I was just like "Whoa",
okay, I feel like actually
there's a turn towards things
need to fundamentally shift.
How that looks and how that plays out
is gonna be different, it's
easier to say it at a conference
than it is to actually
do something about it.
But, I think things are shifting.
- [Female] Um---
- Uh oh (laughs)
- [Female] I wanted to hear
you talk some more about,
you eluded in your talk
to several practices
that are working, or are being
attempted, policy changes
in terms of how police
departments operate,
trying to change those policies.
Second is this reframing
which you just eluded to
of policing itself and
reliance on the police,
that's certainly happened
in the hate crimes movement.
- Thanks to you.
- [Irvashi] Totally
shifted people's thinking
about why are we going
right to criminalization
instead of other strategies
to address this challenge.
Mobilization and education
and raising the visibility
is certainly a strategy that's working,
but I'd love for you to talk more about
these incredible shifts that are happening
and whether your assessment of their value
but fundamentally, your
talk left me wanting
to ask you, do you think it's
possible to reform the police?
Or should the focus of
the work be primarily
the alternative dispute resolution,
alternative mechanisms
for self governance,
community, neighborhood strategies
that we have yet to invent.
This is a tension that you and
I live in our coalition work
in the criminal justice space where
there are prison abolitionists working
alongside prison reformers
and I'm square enough
to admit that I'm a reformer,
but I really, I respect
and actually feel that I'm
moving more towards abolition.
So I'm just, I'd love to
hear you think about that.
I don't know if my question is even clear.
- No it's great, I don't
think police as we know it
can be reformed at all.
I think that they're
rooted in colonial armies
and slave patrols and they operate
as para-military organizations and they,
we all know about
raping, or weapon of war,
I think there's all kinds of, and I think
they're set up to police
not only the lines of race
but also to explicitly police the lines
of gender and sexuality.
I think the reform work
that you and I do is
about harm reduction, it's
about while we figure out
this other world that we're
doing, can we make sure
that people's condoms aren't
being taken away from them,
can we make sure that people
aren't tasing pregnant women.
I definitely think about
reforms as ways of taking power
to harm and enact structural violence
away from institutions.
And yes, I think absolutely
we need to be thinking
about alternate ways
of addressing violence
for the simple reason that
the system hasn't produced
more safety, it's produced more violence.
Not only did Janeisha
Fonville not get protection
from violence in her home, she got killed.
Not only did Maya Hall not
get protection from violence
and had to live at the
intersections of all kinds
of structural, economic,
political, transphobic,
heteronormative violence,
but then she got killed
by the police.
I think Dean Spade says,
"The sum total of violence
that's happening right
now would be lessened
if we actually opened
all the prisons today."
And I think a lot of us are
challenged by that notion
and at the same time it
makes fundamental sense
because the amount of
violence is happening
in prisons and the amount
of violence that prisons
are not preventing.
I think we say that in "Queer (In)Justice"
about hate crimes legislation,
it's like the number
of hate crimes laws has
gone up over thirty years
and the amount of homophopic
and transphobic violence
has not gone down.
So, 30 years later, 15
black trans women killed
this year, can we find another strategy?
We have to find another strategy, because
it's about saving our own lives.
So, I think it's not so much
even a theoretical dispute
for me, it's about what I
see every day in my community
and the violence that's
happening and about reducing
and eliminating that violence
and saving our lives.
And keeping us out of cages
and out of other forms
of horrifying violence.
And I think that one thing
we talked about earlier
with the students is that,
it's not just tearing down
those institutions,
it's also tearing down,
and Alex Lee talks about
this a lot, the values
that produced those institutions.
So, we can come up with
community ways of accountability
and they could equally
involve shaming, exile,
physical violence, sexual
violence, and not allowing
for the possibility that
a person might have made
a mistake and be able to
transform from that mistake.
We can do that without police or prisons,
so let's maybe rethink
that also and come up with
other ways of being with each other.
I think that's going to
be a long-term project.
So, to go to your question, I don't have
the ten-step process to get
there, it's a long-term project.
And I don't think
lawyers are leading that,
just to be clear. (laughs)
I think humans are leading that
and I think what we bring
is particular knowledge
of how this system as it
exists right now works
that we need to devote to
service of the movement.
- [Female] Thank you
so much for your talk.
You have focused in your
work a lot on black women,
LGBT women, trans women,
and have all just spoken
about how one of the major tools you use
is coalition building
and so I was wondering
if you could speak to,
it seems like lifting up
those stories is absolutely crucial
and is so often used to divide activists
and to divide movements
and so I was wondering
if you could speak to how
those things combine for you.
- We're in an important
moment, again, of conversations
I never thought I'd hear,
like I never thought
I'd hear anti-black racism
talked about in the ways
and how and places that it's
being talked about right now
with the depth at which it's
being talked about right now
and there's so much more
conversation to be had there
and I totally support and
believe the things people
are saying about like, if
we examine anti-blackness
and we examine things
in relation to that then
we're actually doing work for everyone.
And I think that we can also
build across communities
based on shared experiences
of policing, right?
Women of color are
profiled for being engaged
in prostitution across the board, right?
So could we not build an
alliance among Korean women
in New York City who
can't operate a business
without being raided every five minutes
and black trans women who
can't walk down the street
without being picked up for loitering
in the purpose of
prostitution every minute.
The experiences are very different,
non-trans Korean women benefit
from cis-gender privilege,
non-trans privilege in ways
that black trans women don't
and come from very
different, so it's not like,
kumbaya, we all get together and do this,
but I feel like that building
from those shared experiences
is where we build real
coalition and when we recognize
the power of relationships
we have with respect
to each other as immigrants,
not immigrants, trans,
not trans, black, not
black, you know and so on,
I think that's where we can actually make
those coalitions real.
And I think that's some
of the work we've done
with communities in areas of police reform
is build intersectional space where people
with many experiences come together
around shared experiences of policing
and educate each other
about how their experiences
are different and it's
not always fabulous.
There's lots of the same
dynamics that happen within,
but there's at least a framework
that creates those opportunities.
Did I answer your question?
- [Female] Yes, thank you.
- [Male] So, I wanted
to ask about the display
of violence and of police
violence, so we're in a moment
where there's so much
awareness that's being raised
through memes and through
video and images and
at the same time it
seems like the very fact
that you can display images of brutality
against black women and men is racist
and that it's routine
to be able to just watch
these videos again and again and have
that be a source of outrage but it's also,
I can't think of anything
comparable being done,
so I'm just thinking about
there's been a number
of these attacks on white gay men,
couples in restaurants and
cafes, and you never see
a video really, you never see, the images
are always too graphic to be shown
and there's more self censorship
of people sharing that
and so, I guess, one question
I had is just thinking
about how to ethically,
as activists around this,
be participating in the sharing
and in the saying of names
in a way that talks more
about people's lives
and not just about the
brutality they suffered
and to not replicate that dynamic.
And then another question
on coalition building,
how to really frame
this work about the fact
that black women and trans
black women, in particular,
are in the most threatened posture
while also acknowledging that
the more the police develops
this kind of militaristic
posture that we're all threatened
so, in New Haven a couple years ago,
a Yale faculty member was
killed in his jail cell
and there was never any
explanations, Samuel C.,
there was never any explanations of that
and to me that was an unthinkable moment
of, wow, this person who
theoretically has all
of this privilege in society
and there's no explanation,
no investigation, no real
substantive investigation
and the sense of that in
which we are all threatened
by these institutions
no matter who we are.
But I'm wondering how you
balance talking about that
in your own work and in the
coalition building work.
- I don't think we're all
threatened by the institutions
in the same ways, at all.
I think that's the sort of tension between
the Black Lives Matter, All
Lives Matter conversation
that I'm not even entertaining,
but I think that talking
about specifically
how those things are different
and also recognizing,
yeah, you can outclass
your race sometimes,
and you can wend up dead
in a jail cell if you're
a black Yale professor, you can wend up,
and to understand, I think
I resist sometimes also,
people saying certain people
are the most effective,
because I think when you're
dead, you're dead, right?
And so I think that people
are differently effected
and some people stand at
the intersection of many,
many, many, many, forms of
police and structural violence
and therefore experience
it almost every instant
of the day and that's
something we need to lift up
and recognize and then also
see everyone's experiences
on a spectrum from there is
how I approach that work.
And that's the power
of building coalitions
and I think some folks are unlikely
to experience police violence
at all in their lifetimes
and hoping that they will recognize it,
being at the center of
the conversation isn't
at all necessary, and
that being allies in ways
that are consensual and
respectful of the leadership
of folks who are at the
center of the conversation
is the way to go.
Your first question was about?
- [Male] Oh, about the
circulation of images.
- Oh yeah, that's
something I struggle with
in my own presentation, every single day.
'Cause I'm not trying to
replicate the pornography
of violence that is out
there and I completely agree
with you that there's a
way in which black life
is not valuable in death, right?
Which is why Michael Brown
could lie in the street
for four hours and et cetera.
When I have longer times to talk, I also,
you might notice in the presentation,
I only show those images
quickly at the beginning
and then I say, I talk
about how those are part
of the violence.
I struggle and welcome
feedback from folks about
how successful or not I was.
I try and show people in their full selves
and at the same time
it's difficult to do that
in short periods of time and I'm trying
to also tell enough
stories that people get
that this is not just like,
Sandra Bland and all the guys.
Or, Maya Hall and all
the non-trans people.
To give people enough
of a flavor of the many,
multiple layers and nuances.
Yes, I always welcome
feedback, people are like,
"Yeah Andrea, you cannot
show those pictures anymore,
stop it.", it's welcome
because I don't want
to participate in that, I
completely agree with you
that that is part of the anti-black racism
that's happening right now.
- Hi
- [Julie] Hi, it's me again.
So at Law for Black Lives,
which I think you were at,
Patrisse Cullors said
something that really stuck
with me, which was, to
a room full of lawyers,
"If you're ready to work yourself
out of a job, let's ride,
but if not, Black Lives
Matter doesn't really care
about what you have to say as an attorney"
and I think that I
100% agree with the
harm reduction approach
with the need to respond
to the unending emergency
that is so many people's lives
with relation to the police
but I also feel concerned
as a law student,
as an organizer, that
embedded in a concern
for that emergency and a desire
to do that emergency work
we also fail to do the thing that Patrisse
is challenging people to do,
which is write themselves
out of their jobs, right
and we are writing ourselves
into direct service work,
into impact litigation work
that we know continues to leave
a massive enforcement problem
to grassroots communities,
to organizers, to the
actual movement, right?
I guess I'm wondering if
you see that tension also
in that direct source paradigm,
what are your feelings on that,
when are we doing too
much on an individual,
immediate, emergency sense and when is
that work taking away
from the power build,
from the organizing, because
as much as I want to organize
from a place of abundance
and believe that everything
is possible, when push comes to shove,
99% of the social justice work
out there is direct services
it's what funders want,
it's what people want to do
in feeling immediately useful,
it's the most obviously clear career path,
there's so many reasons and
so many internal dynamics,
that you said, need to
be dismantled before
we can really begin to ask that question.
I guess I'm wondering, what, if anything,
do you have to say about
when is it too much,
that we're doing too much on that side
and not enough on the other?
If that makes sense.
- No, Julie, as a police
misconduct attorney,
I'm all about moving myself out of a job.
I would, as a criminal
justice reform advocate,
I'm all about moving myself out of a job,
and genuinely, like I
genuinely would like,
I've actually been
thinking about what would
I do if my life wasn't
thinking about police all
the time, I really genuinely believe that.
And it's a tension I
struggle with in my life too.
So, basically my entire
legal career has been divided
in thirds; I do a third
direct, like sue the police
because, I did one, or two
impact litigation cases
and I've done dozens of just regular folks
and usually cases that have come
to me because other
lawyers didn't want them,
'cause they didn't know if
they'd make money on them, right?
So, I've done 1/3 deal
with the cops right now,
1/3 policy advocacy, to
try and change the systems
in which these interactions take place,
so it's not just one person at a time
in that direct service
model that doesn't look
at the systemic sources.
And then 1/3 organizing to build power.
And that's how I organize my career.
Unfortunately what that's meant is that
I actually have three
full-time jobs often.
And someone, maybe you, asked me earlier
about sustainability of life
and that's not been sustainable,
so, I'm just letting
you know that that's a
tension I've struggled
with personally and how
SASS is also set up,
we do help people with their
individual legal issues
because it's hard to
show up at the meeting
if you're in the jail cell, right?
And also, it's hard to
show up at the meeting
and want to do work if you
had this horrible thing happen
to you and we engage
people in systemic policy,
advocacy and change, and we recognize that
that's not the be all end all and that
it's about figuring
out how do we mobilize,
and because funders want
also policy advocacy,
it's really easy to get sucked down
the policy advocacy hole.
I would say that a
significant portion of funding
if it's not for direct services,
it's for policy advocacy.
And so it becomes hard, tension
in internal organizations
who are even trying to hold
all three of those things,
meet people's daily needs
and engage in systemic change
and build the new world to find the time
to build the new world,
'cause of what you're saying
the resources are limited.
And so that's why I'm always challenging
people and ending my talks by saying,
"Actually, the real work
is to build the new world".
And we all have something
to bring to that.
And it's just a question of how we do it.
So, I don't know an answer,
it's a lot of tension.
- [Irvashi] Have you been
waiting to ask a question?
- [Female #2] Yeah, but
we can end, it's okay.
I don't need to ask.
- [Irvashi] No, go ahead.
- [Female #2] Okay.
Oh my god, (laughs) I
almost just took it out.
So my question is kind of getting back
to this idea of visibility and media
and it's really disturbing
to me that these stories
of these women are not being told
and my question is kind
of two prong of like
where are we dropping
the ball in the media
and even in our movement
outreach, our movement media,
how come these stories are not being told,
where we dropping the ball there.
But also where are we
dropping the ball in terms
of other movements of even
caring about these women issues.
Where 50% of the population
or 52% or whatever
the statistic was,
this is a huge part
of the population and
we're just not being heard.
So makes me really angry
I think that that's
my main emotion about
that and it just drives me
to say where is the problem
and where can we go in
and pick up the ball
and say you know we want
to be heard and this is how we do it.
- I'll try and give a brief
answer as we're out of time,
but that's a question I get asked a lot
and that I've been struggling
with my whole life.
I think that part of it
is that there's a story
about state violence and that's about men.
And there's a story about private violence
and that's about women.
And you can't cross over between stories.
So I think it's just about the media tells
the story that it thinks is the story.
So the reason that stop and frisk data
about women just couldn't get out there
is because everyone was telling the story
of stop and frisk as a thing
that targeted young black
and brown men, young black
and brown men, young black
and brown men, so you go to them and say,
"Hey, racial disparities
are the same among women"
and they're like, "That's not my story"
and they just keep going.
So, that's part of the problem.
I think the other part of the
problem is data collection
that often there's not a lot
of data collection period
around women's experiences
and so much media
is data driven.
So, that's why this AP
story is such a big deal
'cause they spent a year
looking at how many people lost
their licenses over sexual misconduct
and then I looked at the
comments in the article
and people were like, "Why wasn't
this story written before?"
and it's like, good question.
It's because people don't
look for that information.
I think the third answer is harder.
Which is that most of the
police violence against women
and queer folks often
takes place in private
so it's not being captured on Cop Watch.
Almost all the stories I told you,
the ones that were
video taped, I told you,
the other ones were not, right?
So, I think there's kinds
of violence that happens
to non-trans, non-gay men
that happens in public spaces
and that's what there's images of
and that's what becomes news.
I think the final and
more complicated answer
is that, in order to
acknowledge state violence
against women of color, we'd have
to also acknowledge community violence
and interpersonal violence
against women of color.
So, to give you an example,
there's an organization
in Bushwick called Sista
to Sista that spent
a summer, 10 years ago,
or more, 15 years ago,
filming cops sexually
harassing young women
of color in Bushwick, 'cause that's
what was bothering young
women in their summer program
so, that's what they made a film about.
Made a film about it, screened
it on the precinct wall
of the 90th precinct during a street fair,
everybody in the
community was like, "What,
this is fucked up" and
people were ready to organize
and the young women were
like, "Yeah, that's messed up
and he does it with the power to arrest me
with a badge, but, you
know, you do that to me too
when I walk down the
street" and then it's like
(groan) (laugh) right?
So I think that's where
the tension happens,
is then we have to address
the continuum of violence
of gender and sexuality
based violence that women
and queer people of color experience
and that would require confronting systems
and relations of power
in our own communities
that maybe people aren't
quite ready to go to
and so it's much easier to fight the man
about the thing that only
happens to the man by the state
than it is to deal with
more complex questions
and that it would also
require us to question
whether police are actually
the answer that are going
to produce safety for
women and queer people
and that's a whole thing that
makes people extremely nervous
so it's much easier to
just cover the easy story,
the one dimensional or the two dimensional
or the three dimensional story rather than
the 36 dimensional story.
(applause)
Thank you, you all were
amazing, thank you.
