Let me ask you about Campaign Zero, efforts
at reform.
They released an 8 Can’t Wait campaign with
eight reforms they claim would reduce police
killings by almost three-quarters.
Abolitionists are responding with an 8 to
Abolition platform.
Explain all of that.
In the midst of this Campaign Zero, which
is an organization of sorts that came out
of the Ferguson uprisings and has been at
the forefront of activists organizing around
police violence, they’ve delivered to us
stats on policing and police violence and
use of force that have been crucial, and they’ve
been uncovering things about police union contracts.
And those things are really essential.
But their program, the 8 Can’t Wait, the
policy reforms that they issued, and came
along with this nice graphic, and it was shared
on social media,
they’re really milquetoast reforms, right?
And what they do is sort of change the rules
of engagement for police, right?
Like, they say, you know, you have to issue
a warning before shooting, or you can’t
use chokeholds, or you can’t shoot at a
moving vehicle, and these sorts of things.
And while those things could do something
in terms of the reduction of police violence,
by Campaign Zero’s own admission on their
website, the 72% number, the reduction of
police violence by 72%, would only happen
if you go from having zero of these reforms
to having all eight at one time.
Then you would reduce police violence by 72%.
But already across the country, a number of
police departments have these reforms in place.
What that means, though, is that you’re
not getting at what the actual issue is, and
that is the broader issue of policing, as
a structure, being meant to and always having
been, in its historical roots, a measure of
suppression, a measure of violent law enforcement,
of white supremacy and capitalism.
And so, the 8 to Abolition response, which
has been led by Black feminist abolitionists,
it’s to say these are actual forms that
are also actionable items right now that you
can do, that actually strike at the heart
of policing.
It reduces points of contact with police so
that we don’t have — we remove police
from schools.
We’re decriminalizing so that we have fewer
interactions with police.
We’re setting up community-led conflict
resolution, so that people don’t call the
police for these minor conflicts, such as
like noise complaints or parking violations
and stuff like that, that could be held — that
could be handled if we were talking to one another.
These are things that are actionable right
now and that you can do to divest from the
idea of policing, carceral logic that has
seeped into all of our thinking, that the
police are somehow a necessity in safety,
when they have proven over and over that they’re not.
