But Actually Imagine Transformative Alternatives to Policing
By: luna nicole (@conflicttransformation), creator of the Imagine Alternatives to Policing flyers (bit.ly/CopsOut) that have recently gone viral on social media.
I am a deeply private person crawling out of relative anonymity because of a local resolution proposed by Mayor Christopher Taylor (as well as council members Ackerman and Grand) of Ann Arbor. The resolution, among other things, calls for investigation into “Police Social Workers” as an “alternative to armed, sworn police officers.” This dystopian nightmare is something I’ve openly expressed fear about ever since the posters were shared nationally in 2018.
Let me be extremely clear: “Police Social Workers” are not an alternative to police. Social workers (or any mental health professional) not designated as police are also not an alternative to police without transformation of the system which connects community members to resources. Social workers (among other professions) are trained and tasked within white dominant institutions and have often been used as a tool of colonization and criminalization — the same is true of conflict mediators and facilitators (my own training). We cannot simply remove one unit (a police officer) and replace them with another unit (mental health professional); our relations in the world, who holds power, and how that power is distributed must change (1). There is a critical difference between funding necessary proactive mental healthcare options and creating a “police social worker” model of enforced, non-consensual counseling and therapy as a renewed form of corrections. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Angela Davis, Mariame Kaba, Michelle Alexander, K Agbebiyi, Kelly Hayes, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and many other scholar-organizers can shed light on the lessons learned from the long history of abolitionist organizing.
Rather than try to elaborate on the already prolific writing on abolition, I will speak to my own organizing, my fears about the use of these flyers, and my hopes for what they could be.
SO, WHO AM I?
I am a 33-year-old white woman originally from the unceded territories of the Mississauga band of Anishinaabe and Bodéwadmiké (Potawatomi) peoples, now known as Berkley, Michigan — a suburb of Detroit populated through white flight. After college I moved to the unceded territory of Meškwahki·aša·hina (Fox) peoples: Ann Arbor, MI — a territory where Black settlers once sheltered formerly enslaved people fleeing to Canada via the Underground Railroad. The history of these lands is significant and cannot be fully expressed here; both places have come to be dominated by white people through the violence of oppression, enacted in the present through dispossession, policing, prisons, and militarization.
While I will not share my personal story, I will say that my immediate family has been directly impacted by the criminal-legal system. Were the world I dream of a reality, we (my older brother and mother in particular) would have been spared significant pain and trauma. I have chosen-family who are exposed daily to racist violence, and I exist in a network of relations with mad, marginalized, queer, and brilliant organizers who have been incarcerated, detained, and deported. Imagining a life in which we are all together, healed, full bellied, sheltered, pink-cheeked laughing, dancing, happy, and free from fear is a means of survival. Our work toward abolition is intimate and personal.
THE FLYERS
I made the flyers in 2018, at a time when I was organizing with a coalition of community groups to advance a demand for the community oversight of police in the City of Ann Arbor. The demand held decades of historic significance within Black-led movements and was reignited by Ann Arbor to Ferguson following the 2014 killing of Aura Rain Rosser, a Black artist and mother who loved to cook (2). While oversight boards are not an abolitionist demand there was a deep desire for oversight by Black elders in particular within the community and an opportunity to continue a conversation about the violence of policing in “liberal utopias” like Ann Arbor. We engrossed ourselves in that work for over two years, while also fighting local presence of the alt-right, developing an urgent response system to police violence, hosting trainings on alternatives to policing, and supporting a local urgent response system for immigration raids.
I was (and am) exhausted by the comments of “well-meaning” liberals that visions of a world without policing and incarceration are “utopian” and “unrealistic” and “idealistic.” These words are weaponized against Black, immigrant, trans, and poor organizers and survivors who detail their experiences of being targeted by policing and offer concrete policy changes that would affirm and protect their lives. In particular, Mayor Christopher Taylor (as well as City Council and recently fired City Administrator Howard Lazarus) have waged an insidious campaign to gaslight Black community members and organizers (3). In response to extensive incidents of harm from policing in Ann Arbor, Taylor responds in total defense of police actions — he cannot imagine a world in which he does not feel threatened by his own constituents to the point of requiring armed guards. He openly names white supremacy and racism as historic national problems, but tells community members and organizers that these same issues are not present in Ann Arbor and certainly not in the AAPD. Taylor absolves his officers and himself of wrongdoing while standing in a “safe” (for who?) pleasantly white-dominant City which has gentrified historic Black neighborhoods. He, alongside most of Ann Arbor, willfully denies a connection between the hoarding of wealth in Ann Arbor and the extensive violence of policing and incarceration in neighboring Ypsilanti. We watched then and watch now as community members stand by the mayor time and time again. Organizers are emotionally exhausted. Black organizers tell me they were too traumatized to return to the work.
So, in 2018 I channeled my frustration by quickly throwing together a group of flyers which I intended to use to initiate dialogue between organizers and community members who were new to the concept of abolition. They were not meant as policy recommendations but rather as a gateway to imagine the actual transformative changes we wanted: if we could imagine that a “city employee” could change brake lights rather than hand out tickets, couldn’t we also imagine that community members could simply do this for and with each other without oversight? Too quickly though, the flyers were ripped from their context.
Fast forward two years and, like Chris Taylor, liberals across the country are now scrambling to preserve law and order without losing face to the demands of a powerful, righteous, justified Black-led movement for liberation following the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Tony McDade. Liberals will perform allyship at marches, make speeches about rooting out white supremacy, they will write resolutions about “data-driven” change, they will do anything to slow down the process of transformation — including share my flyers.
This is the source of my fear. This has kept me up every night for weeks.
We know from experience that the power of liberalism is bound up in the authoritarian power of policing. In order for communities to truly be liberated from oppression, the role of representative democracy and individual wealth accumulation must also be called into question. And not only questioned, but disturbed at the root.
The majority of people will not abide this let alone fight for it. And so the examples of alternatives to policing that I offered have now grown a monstrous life of their own. Rather than a reflective exercise meant to open minds, they are used as examples of how most everything can stay the same even without police — they are used to come up with reformist policy recommendations in total isolation of impacted communities.
So, my call to you is this:
Do what no one can do alone. Sit down with these flyers and have conversations, rather than simply sharing them. Question the words that I chose like “employee” or “urgent responder” or “crisis intervention team.” Question the race neutral language and images. Push the boundaries of who could and should fill these roles and who could and should have the power to shape them. Push the boundaries of how rigid these roles would be regulated and imagine them being flexible to shifting conditions. Imagine the kinds of transformative changes that would be required in your specific context for Indigenous, Black, trans, immigrant, poor, and disabled people most impacted by policing to actually make the decisions of how land, wealth, food, shelter, and healthcare are distributed in a world without police.
Push your mind beyond the realm of what is recognizable and comfortable. Then, beyond talking about it, build the relationships that are necessary to begin the work. Reach out to the local organizations already committed to abolition and offer them your support. If none exist, create them in ways that center impacted people with liberatory politics. Defund the police. But also shift power.
Please, don’t let these flyers be co-opted by white, wealthy leaders looking to continue their own control. Nothing short of transformation will do in the work for liberation.
Endnotes:
- Throughout the history of this nation governments have molded reforms in such a way that they appease dissenters but continue business as usual. If organizers continue to demand the defunding of police there will come a breaking point in which governments will propose reforms that appear on the surface to make sweeping changes, but in fact continue white supremacy in a new form. One example is the use of electronic ankle monitors rather than pre- or post-sentencing detention; organizers demanded a reduction in mass incarceration and the home was transformed into a jail, placing further financial burden on incarcerated people and their families.
- Aura was murdered in her kitchen within seconds of officers Ried and Raab entering her home; their defense: she was gesturing at them with a fish cutting knife. The officers were not only never fired but they were also never even interviewed by “independent investigators” at the notoriously racist Michigan State Police Department.
- This is a direct quote by Mayor Taylor on the night that Prosecutor Brian Mackie announced there would be no charges and no firing of the officers involved in Aura Rosser’s death: “I also believe, after reading the prosecutor’s report, that Officer Ried’s actions were justified. He and his partner acted professionally and properly in defense of Mr. Stephens and in defense of themselves. The plain facts show this to be true. The events of that night of course were a tragedy, but not a tragedy of racism, which is loathsome and unacceptable and contrary to everything Ann Arbor and the Ann Arbor Police Department stands for. The events of November 9 were a tragedy of mental illness untreated and drug use unabated. They were a tragedy of a society that does not devote the resources necessary to give help to those who require it.” Ironically, Mayor Taylor is the person who decides where those resources go and chooses continuously to dedicate them to policing rather than mental health or substance use resources.
