By Michelle S. Phelps
Read the full article from Yahoo News, here.
Michelle Phelps at the University of Minnesota leads a project looking at attitudes toward policing in the city. The Conversation asked her to explain what happened in the Nov. 2, 2021, vote and where it leaves both Minneapolis’ beleaguered police department and police reform movements nationwide.
By Krystle Okafor and Sophie House
Read the full article from Shelterforce here.
“Despite its complexities, abolition holds tremendous promise for the housing field. Technocratic solutions are an inadequate fix for housing policy’s bitter history of racism and expropriation. Such solutions also obscure visionary, bottom-up approaches to housing justice. Following abolitionists’ lead, we can think critically about the racism in our work, set ambitious end goals, build genuine relationships with frontline communities, and foster conditions and institutions to make those visions a reality. This trailblazing moment should not pass us by.”
By Sarah Holder and Kara Harris
Read the full article from CityLab, here.
“In so many of the police shootings that have inspired protests since the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May, fatal encounters with officers began with minor, often unrelated complaints. ‘Abolition seeks to eradicate this Jim Crow system of public safety — not merely a two-tiered system, but a system where one tier benefits by extracting from the other,’ writes Josie Duffy Rice, a journalist and lawyer, in Vanity Fair. ‘Nowhere is the extra layer of unnecessary violence more reflected than in our insistence on sending men with guns to resolve mental health crises.'”
By Jeneé Osterheldt
Read the full article from Boston Globe, here.
Police will give water to Kyle Rittenhouse, your killer, before he shoots you, Anthony Huber and Joseph Rosenbaum. And after you die they will tell the world how he was cleaning walls before he shot you for protesting police brutality. They’ll barely say your names. You were white and fighting for Black lives, so they are burying you like they bury us.
By Eve L. Ewing
Read the full article from Vanity Fair, here.
History would suggest that unionism and policing are, at their foundation, incompatible. For one thing, the officers who founded the FOP made it very clear that it was not a union. In the volume The Fraternal Order of Police 1915-1976: A History, a work commissioned by the FOP itself, cofounder Martin L. Toole is quoted as saying, “We are banded together for our own enjoyment!” Founding officers rejected the name “United Association of Police because ‘that name sounded too much like Union, and Union sounded too antagonistic.’ ”
We want investments in Black communities, determined by Black communities, and divestment from exploitative forces including prisons, fossil fuels, police, surveillance and exploitative corporations.
By Movement 4 Black Lives
Black People Are Dying of Police Terror and Covid19. It is time to defund the police NOW
One effect of the widespread protests across U.S. cities this week has been to renew discussions of what role the police should play in society.
By Leah Donnella
The murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor prove what we already knew—police “reform” has failed.
by Alex Vitale
Ultimately, the only way that we will address oppressive policing is to abolish the police.
By Mariame Kaba