Street Safety hosts resources for protesters.

“This is a time of action... The protesters are working out their ideas and their plans on the streets and without charismatic leaders.... Some protesters call for prison reform and the demilitarisation of the police; others for the abolition of prisons and an end to police funding..... Some people are there simply because they’re fed up with being indoors and there’s a party in the streets.”
-- Adam Schatz.

Build your own analysis through reflection, critical thinking, and the conversation in the streets -- and consider doing popular education.

The situation

“You gave $1,200 to people to survive on in March. What you thought was going to happen? You took summer youth [employment] away from the youth, what you thought was going to happen? They need jobs. Feed our babies and we wouldn’t have this problem.”
--Brigette Brantle, Minneapolis Public School teacher, fired for her views.

“Corporate giants like Walmart and Amazon widely condemned the killing of George Floyd and other policing excesses.... [Amazon CEO] Bezos also pledged $10 million in support of “social justice organizations”.... The leadership of Warner, Sony Music and Walmart each committed $100 million.... Only weeks before George Floyd’s killing, Amazon...faced mounting pressure from labor activists over their inadequate protections, low wages, lack of health benefits and other working conditions. Corporate anti-racism is the perfect egress from these labor conflicts. Black lives matter to the front office, as long as they don’t demand a living wage, personal protective equipment and quality health care.

“The wave of mass protests that George Floyd’s death provoked...was also a consequence of the broader pandemic and real hardship of the shelter-in-place order, which was necessary for public health, but without adequate sustained federal relief, has produced mass layoffs, food pantries hard pressed to keep up with unprecedented need, and broad anxiety among many Americans about their bleak employment prospects in the near future.

“The looting that broke out in many cities the weekend after Floyd’s murder was not like the ghetto rebellions of the sixties, 1992 Los Angeles, or even Ferguson and Baltimore in recent years. The looters were multiracial, intergenerational and targeted downtowns and central shopping districts.... Hyperbolic claims about the primacy of the color line will continue to defer the kind of public goods that might actually help the most dispossessed of all races and ethnicities...most likely to be routinely surveilled, harassed, arrested, convicted, incarcerated and condemned as failures.”

Possibilities

“It is critical to understand the police as a consequence of wealth, not the cause of it. If police are the consequence of wealth then defunding will not abolish them, it will only compel the ruling class to [directly]...hire its own protective and enforcement force.

“South Africa...does not spend anywhere near the amount of resources on police as the United States. So how do upscale malls, financial districts, wealthy white neighborhoods and other configurations of the ruling class protect themselves from the majority of residents living in poverty? They hire private security firms to enforce the rules of the establishment -- not the laws of the province or country.

“When the police arm of government is shut down, the need for a protective and enforcement force for the ruling class will persist. The chambers of commerce, Walmarts and wealthy white enclave[s] will not simply say “well, I guess there are no more police.” They will form...force[s]...answerable only to them. The new privatized police will not be confused for public servants, they will be overt and unambiguous mercenaries.”

History

“George Bush had Rodney King. Under Bill Clinton it was Amadou Diallo shot 41 times, remembered in the Springsteen song American Skin (41 Shots). For George W. Bush, it was Sean Bell. Eric Garner was strangled by police during the Obama term, alongside the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri.... After the police killing of Freddie Gray in Baltimore, Maryland, in 2015, Obama called the protesters “criminals”...[and his] Justice Department did not prosecute Eric Gardner’s [nor]...Michael Brown’s killer.”
-- Peter Van Buren, 24-year State Department veteran

“Numerically, mass incarceration has not been characterized by rising racial disparities in punishment, but rising class disparity. Most prisoners are not in prison for drug crimes, but for violent and property offenses, the incidence of which increased dramatically before incarceration did. And the punitive turn in criminal justice policy was not brought about by a layer of conniving elites, but was instead the result of uncoordinated initiatives by thousands of officials at the local and state levels.”

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, I analyze racial and class disparities in incarceration. My analysis shows that class status has a large and statistically significant effect on (1) whether or not men aged 24--32 years have ever been to jail or prison; (2) whether or not men are jailed after being arrested; (3) whether or not men have spent more than a month in jail or prison; and (4) whether or not men have spent more than a year in jail or prison. After controlling for class, I do not find race to be a statistically significant factor for the first three outcome categories, but I do find that race has a significant impact on whether or not a man has spent more than a year in prison or jail.

Biography

Wisdom from the '50s and '60s