Can the commons replace cops?

Earlier this week, someone shared a post from 2018 that really struck me. It read: “If you call the cops and say “I’m homeless and starving, please help me!” they are not required to (and most likely will not) help you in any way. But, if someone calls them and says “I saw someone taking food out of the trash and sleeping on a park bench!” they are typically obligated to come arrest you or at least chase you away. And yet, people will swear up and down that policing is an essential service that is designed to protect us. They don’t protect people. They protect property. If you don’t have (enough) property, then your protection does not matter to them.”

The sentiment of this statement has felt incredibly apparent these past few months with, amongst others, the US killings of George Floyd in May, Breonna Taylor (for which justice has STILL NOT BEEN SERVED) in her bed in March and this week’s shooting of Jacob Blake seven times in his back by police in Wisconsin, in front of his three young children, as he tried to break up a fight. It’s clear that police brutality, and violence against Black people, people of colour and marginalised people in general, are deeply systemic issues. And it’s not just happening in the USA; countries the world over have countless examples of police brutality; prioritising protection of property and power and acting with systemic prejudice. Take a look at the UK, South Africa, Mexico and India as just a few examples.

The events of the past months have ignited a more mainstream conversation about what it might look like to ‘defund’ or ‘abolish’ the police and to invest in preventing the causes of crime; and spending the money that would usually be spent on policing on schools, hospitals and healthcare, better housing, mental health support and domestic violence interventions. Defunding the police would also look like co-creating alternative systems to prevent and repond to violent crimes.

What does defund the police actually mean? From The Guardian.There’s been some incredible groundwork laid by people and groups the world over to work towards police-less communities (some examples of which I will share below) and it’s a topic of great importance for those of us who are interested in a more mainstream transition to commoning. If the commons can be considered a social system for democratically, equitably and sustainably managing the resources of a community; then there are important conversations to be had about what justice and security might look like in more collaborative, localised, close-knit systems, with minimal or no reliance on the market or state.

With the City of Minneapolis pledging to disband the police; Los Angeles City Council cutting its police budget and the New York abolish the police campaign gaining steam — the possibility of a police-free world isn’t out of the question.

I’d love to know of practical projects and resources that address police abolition and alternatives from a commons perspective — I struggled to find them. If you know of any, please send them my way. I leave you with this cute animation from Dan Nott imagining a police-free future.

With much love,

Elsie

Commoning around the world

Open Policing Project

Hey, the commons is also helping with tracking police/public interactions in the USA. The Stanford Open Policing project is collecting and standardizing data on vehicle and pedestrian stops from law enforcement departments across the country and making that information freely available. To-date they gathered over 200 million records from dozens of state and local police departments across the country.

Find out more about the project here.

Isn’t that public safety?

Luna Syenite made a series of wicked posters a couple of years ago that imagined alternatives to policing.

They demonstrate some really creative alternative responses to some of the situations that we might typically anticipate the police to be involved in (whether they should be or not).

See them all here.

MPD150: A People’s Project Evaluating Policing

MPD150 is a Minneapolis-based, participatory, horizontally-organized effort by local organizers, researchers, artists and activists. The goal of this initiative is to shift the discussion of police violence in Minneapolis from one of procedural reforms to one of meaningful structural change.

Find out more here and read their vision for a police-free future here.

It’s also worth checking out their Minneapolis-based allies Reclaim the Block too here and the national Defund the Police campaign here.

Ankinyi Wirranjiki Night Patrol

Ankinyi Wirranjiki Night Patrols have been a part of community life in Tennant Creek in Australia’s Northern Territory going back to the 1980s.

According to the project, the Ankini Wirranjiki team, comprised entirely of indigenous people, plays a vital role in community safety, while successfully referring clients to external service providers for follow-up support.

Find out more here.

Participatory budgeting

Movement4BlackLives put forward a new approach to public budgets and revenues in order to ensure that resources are raised equitably and follow the needs and fulfil the full human rights of Black communities. To do this they are calling for participatory budgeting: flipping the way budgets are developed by starting with assessing people’s
fundamental needs, prioritizing the needs of communities suffering from injustice ­and then raising revenue in an equitable way to fund needs­-based budgets. This process must be fully participatory, transparent and accountable.

Find out more here.

Communal Justices of the Peace in Venezuela

At the local level, a movement of communal justice is gradually spreading an alternative to the traditional adversarial court system to settle civil disputes.

Read the full article (from 2014) here.

Restorative Justice Practices of Native American, First Nation and Other Indigenous People of North America

This is part one in a series of articles about restorative justice practices of Native American, First Nation and other indigenous people of North America.

Access the interviews here.

This week, we are also reading (and watching)

Abolition across the Atlantic

By Paul. T. Clarke

Why are South Africans not in the streets against police brutality like Americans are? It has less to do with the internet or middle classes. South Africans are captured by punitive logics. Break that.

Read the full article here.

Building a police-free future: Frequently Asked Questions

Available in English, Spanish and Somali, MPD150’s FAQ Zine is meant to be a starting point. It’s short, and shares the basics of what we’re talking about when we talk about abolition. It’s been a very useful tool for sparking conversations with people who haven’t considered these ideas before.

Read and download it here.

Reina Gossett + Dean Spade (Part 3): What About the Dangerous People?

Part 3 in a series of four short online videos produced by BCRW featuring activists Reina Gossett and Dean Spade discussing prison abolition as a political framework, exploring why this is a top issue for those committed to supporting trans and gender-nonconforming people.

Watch the video here.

The end of policing

By Alex S. Vitale

This book attempts to spark public discussion by revealing the tainted origins of modern policing as a tool of social control. It shows how the expansion of police authority is inconsistent with community empowerment, social justice — even public safety. Drawing on groundbreaking research from across the world, and covering virtually every area in the increasingly broad range of police work, Alex Vitale demonstrates how law enforcement has come to exacerbate the very problems it is supposed to solve.

In contrast, there are places where the robust implementation of policing alternatives — such as legalization, restorative justice, and harm reduction — has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice. The best solution to bad policing may be an end to policing.

Find the book here.

Before the police were abolished…

“Here’s something a little different for Friday. I’ve been studying, writing about, and practicing transformative justice for years. After a year of writing weekly photo essays, almost a third of them are about accountability. The idea of writing another one during this encouraging and overwhelming month was really challenging to me. So, to help keep my morale up, I decided to write about police and prisons in past tense, as if they had already been abolished.”

Read it here.

How to defund the police

By Alexis Okeowo

“The billions of dollars that the country has spent on policing in the past five years, he went on, have helped build forces that, on average, kill a thousand people every year; that spending may also have left the country’s health-care system unprepared to deal with an ongoing crisis. Protesters on the streets and, increasingly, people at home are arguing for a change in priorities.”

Read the full article here.

Police Abolition: A Series of links

Since 2014, The Marshall Project has been curating some of the best criminal justice reporting from around the web. Here is their curated list of articles on the topic of police abolition, with a US focus.

Find them here.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked what defunding the police would look like, and responds: ‘a suburb’

“Affluent white communities already live in a world where they choose to fund youth, health, housing etc more than they fund police. “

AOC with the truth bombs as always.

Read the full article here.

Prison abolition with Mariame Kaba and Flynn Nicholls — a comic

“Policing and prisons are inherently ineffective at helping us find justice and peace. Dismantling all systems of oppression is a necessary component to ensuring that people are safe. We want resources, not violence.”

Read the comic here.

What kind of security policy better serves democracy?

What type of security policy at home and abroad do we need to make our democracies fit for purpose? A key panel discussion for our times.

Read the full article here.

Image quote that reads “Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions” — Ruth Wilson Gilmore. From MPD 150.