Because Black Lives Matter, Defunding the Police Can’t Wait!
With hearts bursting with rage, hope, and loving determination, White People for Black Lives (WP4BL) supports the call, led by Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles (https://www.blmla.org), to defund the police as a step toward the complete eradication of the state-sponsored criminalization, surveillance, abuse, torture, and execution of Black people.
We are living through a historically unprecedented uprising, where white people and non-Black people of color are joining Black-led movements in the streets by the millions to mourn and protest the police executions of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and thousands of other Black people whose lives have been cut short by the violent racism of U.S. policing. As this multiracial coalition of protesters is met with an onslaught of police violence in cities across the country, the whole world is watching. Many of us are coming to grasp what Black organizers have known for centuries: that police brutality is not an aberration, but instead that “policing itself is brutality.”[i]
Millions of us are feeling enraged, impassioned, and desperate for immediate change. Our moral urgency is righteous and long overdue. All Black lives matter, and not one more life must be stolen by the state. Period.
And.
Many white folks are finally awakening to the breadth and depth of brutality that 400+ years of white supremacy has wrought. Many are moving beyond the mere act of posting support on social media, and beginning to undertake the work of anti-racism. At this time, it is vital that we not succumb to the seduction of easy solutions offered by the ruling elite that actually solve nothing and only further serve the elite class. Politicians who masquerade as progressives — from Mayor Garcetti in Los Angeles to Mayor De Blasio in New York — aim to convince white people that a new round of regulatory and budgeting tweaks is all it will take to win justice for Black communities and bring an end to institutional white supremacy. They rely on white people’s historic support for the institution of policing as a necessary and beneficial dimension of a safe and orderly society — a naive support rooted in white privilege, ignorance, and miseducation. However, white support for policing is rapidly eroding.
It is time for us, as white people, to stop being silent. Our silence is used by the powers that be as a shield for their lack of action at best, and an endorsement of their complicity at worst. We need to stop being pawns of the elite. We follow the leadership of the Black Lives Matter movement and refuse the allure of simplistic “fixes” that fix nothing.
On the question of police reform vs. abolition, White People 4 Black Lives (WP4BL) endorses the wisdom and direction of Black abolitionist organizers who have a deep and direct understanding of how Black people will win freedom — from cages; from police terror; from centuries-old dispossession of land, labor, and life; from state violence — and how they won’t.
In coalition with the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL), we oppose the flawed emphasis of the #8CantWait campaign, led by Campaign Zero, which dubiously claims that eight reforms in policing will result in a 72% reduction in the rate at which police murder.[ii] In their June 5th statement, “Defunding Police: What It Takes to End Police Violence,” the Movement for Black Lives (https://m4bl.org) notes that many of the use-of-force reforms being called for in the #8CantWait campaign have been in place in police departments across the country for decades.[iii] Here in Los Angeles, five of those eight reforms are already in place — and yet the LAPD remains the most murderous police force in the United States.[iv]
In a letter signed by Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition (https://stoplapdspying.org), and the Los Angeles Community Action Network (https://cangress.org), organizers warn against the danger of campaigns that advance “superficial reforms” and “feel good optics.” As police forces everywhere are facing a massive crisis of legitimacy and organizers are shaping demands for change, BLM-LA et al. ask these vital questions of the movement:
Will we settle for cosmetic reforms that leave the structures and realities of policing in place, but give politicians the appearance of having addressed the problem?
Or do we demand change that imposes meaningful accountability for harmful officers; removes the vast resources used by police to devastate our communities; changes the legal structures that legitimate police violence; and re-envisions our safety through community empowerment instead of police suppression and surveillance?[v]
As WP4BL, we answer this call to consider the depth of our commitment. We align ourselves with the radical transformation of public safety away from policing and support the seven changes called for in the letter:
1. defunding the police and instead investing in community-based safety interventions;
2. prosecuting cops who kill or harm, as well as those cops who are bystanders in instances of police violence;
3. prohibiting police unions from contributing to district attorney electoral campaigns;
4. ending community policing programs that cast policing as social work;
5. dismantling surveillance technologies and programs that advance racist policing;
6. giving community true civilian oversight powers; and,
7. changing legal mandates that encourage authoritarian policing, such as “qualified immunity.”
Incremental reforms to the institution of policing — when they increase police budgets, tools, tactics, and cultural legitimacy — are fundamentally flawed. In fact, they are fatal distractions. As M4BL has written:
“Too many people have died and too many communities have been torn apart for us to tinker at the edges of a deadly problem.”
In fact, during the writing of this WP4BL statement, two organizers with the #8CantWait campaign, Brittany Packnett Cunningham and Samuel Sinyangwe, came forward to explicitly agree with the goal of defunding the police. They have apologized for the way #8CantWait obscured M4BL’s demands to defund and abolish the police. In an example of courageous leadership, Cunningham shared her decision to leave Campaign Zero, stating, “We owe it to ourselves — and I owe it to you — to honor the radical imagination of this moment. I come from a people that could not see the freedom they imagined — but they still fought for it. So must we… Divestment from the institution of policing — and reinvestment in Black communities — is the necessary central strategy of this moment. Putting people first is not radical, it is right. Investing in people means investing in the programs and structures that keep us safe and well — without violence.” [vi]
White People 4 Black Lives believes that Black lives matter. Not just 72% of Black lives. We are not fighting for a society where fewer Black people are executed by police. We are steadfastly committed to building a future where all Black lives matter, and where Black people are never again targets of racist state terror. In order to secure that future, we demand that elected officials everywhere listen to the call of millions to defend Black lives by defunding the police.
This article is written by White People 4 Black Lives (WP4BL). WP4BL is a white anti-racist collective and activist project of the Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere (AWARE-LA) and operates within a national network of white anti-racists called Showing Up for Racial Justice. WP4BL is rooted in acting in solidarity with Black Lives Matter: Los Angeles. Visit www.awarela.org and follow us @wp4bl.
[i] See page 14 of the CR Abolition Organizing Toolkit here: CR abolition toolkit.
[ii] Cherrell Brown and Philip V. McHarris dispute the data science upon which the claims of #8CantWait are based, here: #8cantwait is Based on Faulty Data Science.
[iii] Read the article here: Defunding Police: What It Takes to End Police Violence.
[iv] Don’t live in Los Angeles? This site can help you find a way to #DefundPolice in your city or town: https://defund12.org.
[v] The statement can be found here: https://cangress.org.
[vi] See her post here: https://medium.com/@MsPackyetti/a-choice-to-transition-20519bf502ac.
