00:00:07:05 - 00:00:24:12
Unknown
Everybody stand up.

00:00:24:14 - 00:01:30:05
Unknown
Right. My staff. no, none. The first thing you have to do is stop. You cannot reform this guy's life. You know, we've been sold this false choice of policing or nothing, which has been used to terrorize people into accepting policing when there's a whole long list of things that they would rather have that they know would help address the problems in their communities.

00:01:30:07 - 00:02:13:10
Unknown
Policing isn't just about the police. It's about like land and territory. It's about resources. It's about who's seen as a member of the public. It's about property, very inherently about capitalism and property. You know, protecting white people's property, all these things. Right. And you can understand that if you don't understand the history of your country, a lot of our mistakes in the past have come from our conceptual heirs, like we had a conception of justice for 50 years that gave us racialized mass incarceration in the New Jim Crow, a conception of justice rooted in retribution, retaliation and revenge.

00:02:13:12 - 00:02:39:07
Unknown
Looking at our entire system through a lens of rehabilitation and prevention. Will will completely alter the DNA of our criminal legal system. And frankly, I think it will take us to a place I would call it a criminal justice system. I purposely take injustice Ottawa because I believe the system that has so many injustices can now be called the justice system.

00:02:39:09 - 00:03:35:19
Unknown
The way that we can create public safety in a way that serves everyone is by agreeing that everyone deserves to be safe, because we don't really believe that right now. Race in this country has never really been removed from the political dialog. We still continue to live the vestiges of slavery, and I know that people get sometimes offended when I make the statement, but the reality is that we have them because we won't reckon with our past, because we will let older people say, that's so old, and you know, let's not talk about that anymore.

00:03:35:20 - 00:04:04:08
Unknown
Slavery was so long ago. We haven't had it for 200 years. This is, you know, not realizing that we never reckoned we never repaired any of it at all. So now we're here, so we're finally getting these glimpses of folks speaking out. Right. Critical race theory. The reason that has to get shut down is because, again, it's acknowledging the birth defects of this country.

00:04:04:10 - 00:04:37:12
Unknown
And we sort of transferred to the process of legalized slavery by indentured servitude or having people, you know, just being property. And we converted that. And eventually we did this through housing practices and, you know, public health, practicing education. And then the criminal legal system came into play in a big way. And it always played a role, by the way, play a role here in full slavery in, you know, the way that so many of the laws were created and policing was really built around.

00:04:37:14 - 00:04:57:15
Unknown
People want to grasp on to. Well, not all police are bad right? And I have to remind folks, it isn't about the individual police officer at all. It's about the institution of policing that is rotten to its core. And it's rotten to its core because of how it was, what it was born out of. It was a slave catching unit.

00:04:57:17 - 00:05:38:12
Unknown
So you have a profession now which is a handed down profession, right? Like often police officers, it's their cousins, their uncles, their nephews, their children. These are jobs that you're kind of born into. So if you go back in the lineage of policing, you're going to find that those folks were slave catchers, Right. And Klan members. So it should be no surprise that this is where we are 100 years later and a matter of reform and more money for policing, all while increased militarization of policing is never going to do yield any different results.

00:05:38:14 - 00:05:51:21
Unknown
And part of my frustration on the campaign trail was, you know, other folks running for mayor don't want to talk about the root causes of why we're here.

00:05:51:23 - 00:06:16:01
Unknown
Yeah, my journey to teaching law came through my experience as an eight year old when I was introduced to the majesty of the law in a Breonna Taylor style raid on our home door was kicked in. Any length of officers came in and my seven siblings and I were lined up my six foot, eight inch dad, who I thought was indomitable, was down on the floor, prostrate.

00:06:16:03 - 00:06:54:23
Unknown
And the next time I saw him upright was on family day at the Ohio State Penitentiary. He was given 22 to 55 for possession and sale of marijuana because that's how they brought down uppity black men back in those days. He was looking at all 55 of those years, except that he was able to reach up on the warden's shelves and pull down his law books, teach himself con law, criminal procedure, criminal law, and represented himself pro say, wrote his own words, habeas corpus and triumphed in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeal, which handed down decision, said something you would have thought would have been established well before his case.

00:06:55:01 - 00:07:07:14
Unknown
That is a denial of a defendant's due process for the state to its prosecutor to deliberately lie to a jury to get a conviction.

00:07:07:16 - 00:07:40:12
Unknown
You know, all my friends, when I was growing up, most of them, almost all of them never had their dads around. You know, I didn't have a father figure. And that's why, you know, we were running the streets. You know, that's why we were stealing, you know, drinking, you know, experimenting with drugs and stuff like that. Because I feel like it's important to have that role model, you know, that I had I was privileged to have, you know, I was blessed to have, you know, And so what I realized that all of their dads were in jail.

00:07:40:14 - 00:08:04:17
Unknown
All of them were locked up and or they were, you know, addicted, you know, to to drugs or, you know, had anger issues because they were alcoholics and stuff, but they didn't have the help. There weren't a lot of rehab programs that were in a lot of resources and different opportunities, even for young people like me and it was just a vicious cycle.

00:08:04:19 - 00:08:36:06
Unknown
You know, I was as a therapist, I noticed that trauma and how it centered intergenerational, that intergenerational trauma is very impactful. You know, it's if you don't, you know, have that support, that safety net from your community, then, you know, you just fall into this kind of pit of of self-destruction. Like I said, you know, there is an inverse relationship in safety and incarceration.

00:08:36:08 - 00:09:01:18
Unknown
There is a period in the very early stages where incarceration may may play a role as you're removing someone from society. But at some point, actually the reverse is starts to occur where now you have the factors of the likelihood of you engaging in crime go up. So when people get released and by the way, 95% of the people that are incarcerated come back out, you're being released and you don't have good opportunities for employment.

00:09:01:20 - 00:09:29:00
Unknown
More than likely you not have housing. And you know, your your alternatives are very limited. And on top of that, you know, sort of engaging in criminal behavior has become the norm for you. And you are more likely to commit crimes. So when you again, going back to the course of incarceration and the value of it, it's not a deterrent likely to increase crime for at least a cycle, a period of time.

00:09:29:00 - 00:10:10:18
Unknown
Any individual is very costly financially. It creates a lot of social displacement. You have families now where you may not have the father presence with the kids, which leads to, you know, problems further down the line. All those factors for me start to play a role in my decision as to why, Generally speaking, incarceration should be a very limited option and it should be an option that is used with a very surgically with an eye towards actually rehabilitation and release.

00:10:10:20 - 00:10:46:07
Unknown
Give me clearly the streets, the law to the people that people aren't used to freedom. So freedom is is this new experience the ability to leave live without the fear of the law. You know, at least fearless people. I was born into social justice. I this fight for social justice. If you look at my birthday, I was born on April 4th.

00:10:46:07 - 00:11:10:07
Unknown
That's a day in a different year. Martin Luther King Junior died. Maya Angelou was born on my birthday. Adam Clayton Powell Jr. He died on my birthday in a different year. So my birth date is significant in black American African-American history. And my parents actually met. My parents met at a civil rights rally. They were day my dad led a walkout at their high school.

00:11:10:09 - 00:11:38:13
Unknown
My mother, who was going to Black Panther meetings at the time, saw what was going on. She looked out of the window. He was like, Hey, girl, we're protesting. Come on down. They went downstairs. She went downstairs. My aunt introduced him. And you know, the rest is black history, right? What they were protesting was they fought for African-American studies class and then they bought a white teacher in, you know, to teach black kids about their history.

00:11:38:15 - 00:12:08:07
Unknown
And we thought that was really inappropriate. They thought it was inappropriate. So they fought and they won. So, you know, all my activism, baby, I guess this country is totally happy with violent white supremacists killing black people by or killing Jewish people. They are indifferent to our sufferings. They might act like they care. Democrats, Republicans, it doesn't matter to me.

00:12:08:09 - 00:12:44:01
Unknown
They may act like they care, but no one really cares about us. So when you hear people say Back the Blue Way, you also read the subtitle and it says, Keep those niggers in line. They're happy with you. As I looked more and more into the history of policing and looked firsthand at policing around the world, certain continuities emerge.

00:12:44:03 - 00:13:16:05
Unknown
You know, police are violence workers, even if they're not carrying guns, even if they rarely shoot people. At the center of that institution is the capacity and authorization to use violence on behalf of state interests. And that leads to kind of the other continuity, which is that police have always played a central role in propping up a status quo that has winners and losers.

00:13:16:07 - 00:13:52:18
Unknown
And police have been a tool for maintaining the advantages of the winners. And so there's a famous 19th century saying, you know, the law in its majesty forbids both the rich and the poor from sleeping under bridges, stealing bread and begging in the streets. So even a seemingly neutral laws around property crime, for instance, as enforced in the modern world, you know, the burden of that falls on the already most vulnerable, the already most left out populations.

00:13:52:20 - 00:14:25:05
Unknown
And policing has always played that role. It's a lot of the history that people believe only belongs to the southern United States is part of the history of Nova Scotia segregation. And that, of course, is accompanied by policing and years and generations and centuries of white supremacist violence and terrorism in this province towards a historic black population. Part of the problem in Canada is that we always displace everything that's happening on to the states and specifically the U.S. South, and then believe that it doesn't happen in Canada.

00:14:25:05 - 00:14:59:09
Unknown
We don't have the same history. So fighting things like policing is perhaps more difficult in Canada or difficult in its own way because we have to fight through the idea that black people even exist in Canada right now, you know, like where even a thing that racism exists and that police actually do brutalize us. You know, we just had a recent report in Toronto, the use of force and strip search report that showed that black people and this is adjusted for race, like all the numbers, 20 times more likely to be stopped by the police like compared to white people and 1.6 times more likely to be strip searched.

00:14:59:09 - 00:15:23:03
Unknown
And, you know, like we keep getting all these numbers in Halifax, we had a report, the WORTLEY report, that showed that black people are six times more likely to be stopped by the police for street check what we call street checks, what people for stop and frisk or carding. So, you know, these are all things that exist, but it's taken us years to kind of prove it because it's always been an idea that that doesn't happen here.

00:15:23:05 - 00:15:53:02
Unknown
One of the points that you'll hear sometimes of black and white critics of the criminal justice system be showing in leniency what they view as leniency towards wrongdoers is they'll say, well, wait a minute, you know, choice. You have choice. When you exercise choice, you can't blame any of the surrounding circumstances or structural factors or systemic things. You made a choice.

00:15:53:06 - 00:16:12:03
Unknown
When you exercise your will, when you make a choice, then it's about personal responsibility and you leave out systemic and structural factors. You hear that over and over again. And this is one of the reasons I said theory matters and we have to address that at its root. And here's how we start to address that at its root.

00:16:12:03 - 00:16:53:17
Unknown
You know, I, I don't talk about this much, but, you know, while we're on the subject, as a result of my dad's incarceration, my mom took her own life. Now, again, a lot of people may say that's self-destruction. That's not social oppression, her taking her life by her own hand. Right. But one of the things that Durkheim brought home to us is one of the founders of sociology was that you can take what looks like a very personal choice of go to suicide.

00:16:53:17 - 00:17:16:20
Unknown
This was his famous work, suicide. You can take what looks like a very private personal choice that's only response to one's own demons. But if you look at it in a system, make way from it for that, for the patterns that emerge from collective activity. And what you see is it's not a private choice at all that suicide.

00:17:16:20 - 00:17:35:10
Unknown
Eids in some societies are high, In some societies they're nonexistent in societies in which suicides happen. Some groups have a lot of them each year. Some groups have hardly any of them each year. And those rates of suicide, those different rates of suicide are stable from year to year. You can you can bet on them. You know, they're going to happen from year to year.

00:17:35:12 - 00:18:03:00
Unknown
So suicide itself is as much, if not more, a social fact than a psychological act. And you erase the social context when you just focus on the personal choice part. Take Sandra Bland. You know, wow. Now wow, Get out of the car for failure to signal you're doing all of this work. Get over there, right? Yeah. Yeah. Let's set the court.

00:18:03:02 - 00:18:28:11
Unknown
Let's go ahead for perhaps she committed suicide. The police have contended that she has. I'm going to assume that she did. For the sake of further analysis, let's assume that she took her own life. But that act of self-destruction was preceded by one of social oppression. And the act of social oppression is what precipitated the self-destruction. And so is responsible for the self-destruction.

00:18:28:14 - 00:19:02:03
Unknown
When that police officer wrongfully pulled her over, pulled her out of the car, and Barrett murdered her on the side of that road, humiliated this proud black woman, degraded her, threw her in a jumpsuit and in a and in a cage right. That social oppression led to her act. You may want to call it self-destruction, but that destructive self-destruction, the seeds of it were planted by the social oppression.

00:19:02:03 - 00:19:44:23
Unknown
And the social oppression is directly responsible for it. All. So I was with LAPD for 11 years and I started off as a patrol. Then I later worked in the detective division doing the Auto detectives, which is working with vehicles. Then I later moved on to working undercover. Then I finished out working for the city Attorney's office as a liaison for domestic violence.

00:19:45:01 - 00:20:10:22
Unknown
What led me to LAPD was basically I wanted to be a detective. Law and Order was like my favorite show. And, you know, I really liked the fact that solving what I thought were, you know, huge crimes for people would be of benefit to them and me because I'm just have a caring type of heart. So I was like, This is something interesting, so let me figure out how to do this.

00:20:10:22 - 00:20:40:00
Unknown
So the only way to do this was to become an officer. And then you have to promote and you have to take interviews and you have to do several different things before you can actually become a detective. It was nothing like I thought it would be from day one. When you go into the academy, you're being brainwashed, you're being yelled out, you're going to get in line, you're going to get straight and you're going to do what we tell you to do.

00:20:40:02 - 00:21:19:23
Unknown
You're learning how to take orders. You're learning how to address victims, suspects, mostly suspects, and you're learning tactics, You're learning shooting. You have to get tased. You have to get the pepper spray in your eyes. You have to go through all of that just to make it through. You have to shoot every two weeks for training. And when you start training, it's every day like that was like a really big challenge for me because you have to wrap your mind around hurting someone with a gun.

00:21:20:01 - 00:21:43:15
Unknown
They try to veer away from emotional processes. It's the high stress. High stress because they're, you know, you got to shoot you got to shoot well and you got to know why. And so, you know, that was a very stressful time for me. And then after that, throughout the academy, you get tased. And tasing was like a big deal because everybody has to get tased.

00:21:43:15 - 00:22:02:22
Unknown
And then they had this crazy game where, you know, guys would try to hold out as long as they had until they set out. Like, I didn't understand that either. I was just like, it's almost like Disneyland for cops. And then once you get out in the real world, it's nothing like that. You're actually talking to real people.

00:22:02:22 - 00:22:20:17
Unknown
You're talking to a real suspects. These are somebody acting. This is not a cop. This is not your boss that's acting Like I said, this. This is somebody you need to get to to no, to the bottom of, to top to in the end, like towards the end of the academy. Right. When you're about to graduate, we have these little scenarios that they'll do.

00:22:20:17 - 00:22:43:23
Unknown
And then that's when they want you to start talking to the victim or talking to the suspect because you don't know if it's a suspect or not yet. And for me, that got my wheels turning like, yeah, we're not going to know what we're walking into. So where is the more training like this? You know, you just have to make a split decision and not everybody's ready to make a split decision.

00:22:43:23 - 00:23:28:13
Unknown
But that is what you're going to encounter once you get out there. And they gave us such a small little test at the end. So it's so in the academy, they don't really teach you how to deal with people. Not really. There's a desire to try to remake policing, to be more like social work, more reliant on dialog and good communication skills, more focused on a kind of procedural justice that involves more openness, transparency in communication with the public.

00:23:28:15 - 00:24:01:20
Unknown
And this sounds very good on the surface, right? When we have an encounter with a police officer at a traffic stop, we want to be treated with some courtesy, professionalism and respect. But this kind of ignores the actual functional nature of the vast majority of policing, which is that they're there to micromanage the lives of vulnerable, suspect and demonize popular actions.

00:24:01:22 - 00:24:32:02
Unknown
They're there to intimidate young people. They're there to harass homeless people. They're there to drive drug dealers off a street corner. And that is, in essence, about the mobilization of coercion and violence. And that is why departments spend all their effort in the training process focused on that mobilization of violence. Because when push comes to shove, that is what is at the heart of policing.

00:24:32:04 - 00:25:14:02
Unknown
And if we want social workers, if we want mental health workers, if we want school counselor ers to go out and solve problems, then we should hire those people and not police. You know, when you're fresh out of the academy in this happened to me, you go somewhere and somebody's trying to talk to you and then you just, you know, you're bark at them and you don't even know why you barked at them like you were my.

00:25:14:04 - 00:25:32:14
Unknown
I still remember I bark at this, this young lady, and I was fresh out. I was like part of my fifth day out of the academy. And he was like, Wow, you'd have to talk to her like that. Even though he'd been drilling me to do that to everybody. Don't look at anybody. Don't do you know, Don't do this, Don't do that.

00:25:32:16 - 00:26:17:01
Unknown
And I still remember that. And I feel horrible because I wasn't me. That was my training. Yeah, but I know I'm okay. You know, I worked in South Central Los Angeles. I work with Youth were houseless. I work with youth who, you know, had, again, addiction problems, deal with with substance use issues. And I work with youth in foster care.

00:26:17:01 - 00:26:48:18
Unknown
I mean, I think that all of those things are a result of policing and the castle system like a lot of them would tell me that, you know, they would get harassed by the police because they were sleeping on the street. They had run out of time at the shelter they were at, for example. And a lot of them would say that, you know, they would stop them for no reason, just because of how they dress or who they were with.

00:26:48:20 - 00:27:22:00
Unknown
If someone had been stopped in the past and they would always recognize them and again, just for no reason, ask them questions, give them the third degree. Right. So all of this creates anxiety, right? It creates a intense kind of feeling of paranoia. It creates this sense of insecurity and low self-esteem. Because if you're not again lifted up as a human being, then the opposite is going to happen.

00:27:22:04 - 00:27:53:17
Unknown
It's going to be detrimental. And so I dealt with a lot of anxiety diagnosis, social anxiety, diagnosis, depression, you know, and again, all rooted in the way that policing affects young, black and brown people of color. I'm born and raised in Los Angeles, and I went to a school where my best friends were black. They would have experiences with police that I would hate, and then they would go home and tell their parents and their parents would tell them that they're lucky.

00:27:53:17 - 00:28:15:00
Unknown
That's all that happened. Four things they didn't do. I knew because I come from a family of lawyers that we have all these rights. And when I would go home and do something, even if I was guilty, you know, there was still like a law and a process. And it really clued me into the issues that people are treated differently.

00:28:15:02 - 00:28:33:14
Unknown
I started learning about checkpoints in 2011, and I found that the checkpoints are being used to target Hispanics in like Chula Vista. And as Candido, I went to San Diego State and I actually went to these checkpoints because I was going to checkpoints and advocating that I thought they were wrong. I would kill the signs in front of the checkpoint.

00:28:33:14 - 00:29:00:00
Unknown
I would say checkpoint ahead. That's when I had an interaction with an officer where he drove up on his motorcycle and he says, Put your sign down. And when I asked why, he said, You can answer why in fucking jail, I told you to put your sign down. I did go home that night, but it was after that that I realized that any interaction that I would have with an officer or even when I would see officers, that I would start filming them because I was shocked that his response to me.

00:29:00:02 - 00:29:20:22
Unknown
And I believe that that's something that the people should know. What's your name? What's the matter? Okay. Okay. Thank you. Need to leave the area. I do. My car is there. I can go to your car. We talked to Dave over an hour ago. He didn't go. So you can walk that way right now. We're going to. You're going to let me leave.

00:29:20:22 - 00:29:42:03
Unknown
If I told you my name, you failed. They'll the attitude test. And you are that your First Amendment right to not tell you my name. I just want to go to my car. I haven't done anything different. You told me to stand here and in being arrested. Let me. What are you doing? That's why I'm out as often filming police as often as I see them.

00:29:42:03 - 00:30:05:07
Unknown
The reality is, is if I if I go to the market right now and I see someone pulled over, especially Brown or a black person, I'm pulling over and I'm going to film, not stop until it's done. I do find that when I am filming police and interactions, especially when they are talking to brown and black people, that the investigation seems to be expedited.

00:30:05:09 - 00:30:32:15
Unknown
And I've seen situations where they're searching someone's car. I go to film and soon enough all this that's going back in the car and they're letting the person go. I think that happens more times than not. And that's where it's no question Is providing transparency with police a benefit to the public? It's without a doubt. One time I was on a car and it was child abuse.

00:30:32:17 - 00:31:05:23
Unknown
And child abuse basically takes a very long time to investigate and to get details on. And you have to remove kids at that moment if you suspect something to a certain level. According to my training officer, they say one thing, but I know the child says something different. But because he's my training officer and he's my my supervisor for that for for the time being, I have to go with what he says.

00:31:06:00 - 00:31:38:15
Unknown
So I started noticing that a lot with different stuff. Like, okay, so you're going to say this on your report, but this is what actually happened. You write it like this. Kennedy Because this is how we write. This not is not specifically for what happened. And so that was happening on a small scale and on large scales. And then I became an undercover officer who was investigating over officers.

00:31:38:17 - 00:32:29:02
Unknown
So that really opened my eyes into what they do investigate and what they don't. And what we were investigating were things that, in my opinion, was just human beings, stuff like people. Yeah, they do stuff, but it's not criminal. It's not. They're not hurting anybody. But okay, yeah, it's against our policy and they're off duty. The stuff that they should be investigating or the team, because the team that actually investigated the hardcore stuff I give a cop killed someone or like really bad stuff like that was, you know, done differently.

00:32:29:05 - 00:33:07:22
Unknown
I could say they had a way of doing it and they only let certain people in that type of route because you had to have a mindset like, you're not trying to burn this car, but we have to find out what happened type thing. So in those in these types of divisions or departments or whatever you want to call it, they're exclusive.

00:33:08:00 - 00:33:33:06
Unknown
They're not going to let anybody, just anybody in our room. And why is it like that? Because they're hiding something. Obviously, you got to go along to get along is what the name of the game is. Internal Affairs is a mechanism for protecting the image of the department, not producing justice, not getting rid of bad cops. It's about image management.

00:33:33:08 - 00:34:09:10
Unknown
And so they want to conduct investigations so that they can minimize the harm to the department, either by excusing harmful behavior, putting it under the carpet, or they will throw an officer under the bus, such as Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis today, a jury in Minnesota found former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin guilty on all counts in the murder of George Floyd last May.

00:34:09:12 - 00:34:37:23
Unknown
Normally, we see departments go to the mat to protect officers from charges of misconduct, except when the misconduct is so terrible that it threatens the institution itself. So what we saw in Minneapolis was the department itself training officers, the chief testifying against the officer because they understood that in order to protect the institution, they had to sacrifice that officer.

00:34:38:01 - 00:35:10:07
Unknown
It's not a good feeling to be in that type of environment all the time. When you're you you're constantly questioning your ethics, you're constantly checking your morals. Do I throw my morals out and just do the job? Do I forget about my integrity, even though integrity is one of the things you have to be like, really good at as a cop, but who has integrity around here is what I kept finding myself saying after I had a baby.

00:35:10:07 - 00:35:56:10
Unknown
You know, I found I found it back and I was like, I'm not teetering for anyone anymore. And so that's when I found a job that actually gave me hours. Or I could actually be a mom and help out my family. And then that's when I had to leave because my family, my sanity and my children are the most important thing to me.

00:35:56:12 - 00:36:18:16
Unknown
Our journey from reformer to revolutionary when it comes to criminal justice matters. I started as a reformer thinking that, you know, we're talking about bad apples, and that's how I initially kind of processed the problem, even going back to Rodney King, even going back to Rodney King, you could look at those officers beating Rodney King as bad officers.

00:36:18:16 - 00:36:43:11
Unknown
There were four of them who were tried in Simi Valley, even though there were a lot of other officers standing around watching the beating going on as well. But you could still call that a bad apples issue. And taking forward now to the Black Lives Matter movement, which was taking the Rodney King incident, even the videotape missed the police misconduct part.

00:36:43:12 - 00:37:13:03
Unknown
But now you have it going on with the cell phone and here comes the processional hashtag. And with each hashtag comes another reform. I remember vividly, you know, we we see a hashtag and it would involve a police officer shooting someone who was running away. And we see more training, better training that'll help to prevent that. Then we see another police officer do something egregious and we say, well, that might have to do with community policing.

00:37:13:03 - 00:37:42:18
Unknown
We need to take a community policing model and then there'd be another atrocity and we say, Well, body cam certainly would help to solve a lot of those issues implicit bias training. We went through one after the other and till we got to the George Floyd case, I will never go, I was injured for the Minneapolis Police Department.

00:37:42:18 - 00:38:05:00
Unknown
Have all of the reform. They had the body cam. They have implicit bias training, they had a de-escalation training, They had the community policing. They had all that and more everything you could imagine. And not only did you have not only one officer involved in the killing of George Floyd, right. But the others who stood back lead you to believe.

00:38:05:02 - 00:38:40:10
Unknown
Well, please understand that every just again, back to Rodney King. All right. But a year later, you had Dante Wright killed, right, by the officer who would eventually convicted of his killing. And All right, now in this police department, there was supposed to be one of the exemplars of reform. So it became abundantly evident that reform is not the solution here.

00:38:40:12 - 00:39:04:01
Unknown
And it isn't a solution for a number of reasons. One, police officers cannot train their way out of unconscious anti-black bias. I used to think they could. I used to think that one of the things you could do with police officers is train them out of their anti-black bias. I was one of the early writers in critical race theory on unconscious bias.

00:39:04:01 - 00:39:32:16
Unknown
I moved from a Freudian analysis, took it over to kind of the social cognition area where we had replicable studies that you could go into the laboratory and identify unconscious bias in its very operation. And I, even in my most recent scholarship, have been looking at other kinds of research that is focused on brain imaging. And when I did my early work on unconscious bias, we didn't have the brain imaging studies.

00:39:32:16 - 00:39:54:11
Unknown
Now we have them and we're able to say, here's your brain, here's your brain on race. We're able to see how it operates. And what we see is that at the unconscious level, there is this bias, no doubt, but that there's very little we can do about it. No body counts should have worked. It should have provided transparency.

00:39:54:11 - 00:40:10:16
Unknown
What the problem is, is the people pay for the body cams. And then where does that footage go? It goes to the police. We first have to trust that the officer is going to wear the body. Can't actually back it up. We first have to trust that we can get body cams in a department anywhere in the country.

00:40:10:16 - 00:40:30:20
Unknown
Some departments don't have body cams. Once the body cams are administered in a department, we have to trust that the department will use them, that the officers will then put them on when they're working, that the officers, if it's physically on, will turn it on when they're in the interaction, and that when after the interaction that they'll be transparent with the footage.

00:40:30:22 - 00:40:49:19
Unknown
If any of those things don't happen at the body cams and our advocacy to make sure that police have body cams unfortunately was a waste, how can you have your body cam around? But most of you don't think your unconscious isn't on our body cams only get on when we have to act. I know, but yours is. Stand by, right?

00:40:49:19 - 00:41:11:21
Unknown
Yeah. Why is yours not on stand by? Yeah. Could you put it on standby? Sure. Please. Thank you, sir. Have a good day. Alone. 800 cameras, all they want to get away with if we're going to test it out. Okay, Kimberly, I can just hear you turn that on him. My just doesn't have his body cam on. Sanchez doesn't have his body camera on it.

00:41:11:22 - 00:41:36:11
Unknown
Then just turn on his fucking. And they killed they got my badges and right. That was just awesome. I thought it was weird. Their body cam jammed and it's just a signal right now. Policing, like I said, it's not is a practice. Meaning that like when we encounter the police. Yeah, they're arresting us, you know, but it's also us an ideology.

00:41:36:11 - 00:41:57:06
Unknown
It's how people think, Right? And the idea of believing in punishment, that there are bad people, good people, and then who needs to be punished, which is really a question of who's not seen as a member of the public, which historically has been black people, indigenous people, drug users, people with disabilities, people with mental health problems, sex workers, queer and trans people.

00:41:57:08 - 00:42:25:01
Unknown
You know, all of these groups are seen as outside the public, immigrants, whoever. Right. And that's what makes us the people who need to be policed, the people who are outside the thin blue line, the people of that thin line is holding back. Right. That line between chaos. We are the chaos. So unless you shift how people think about that and ask people to really think about like, why do you call police when someone's asking for change outside demands, you know, like, why do you think the police are appropriate mechanism when somebody is living in a tent?

00:42:25:03 - 00:42:50:00
Unknown
We are taught to call 911 before we're taught to speak like it's the first thing we're taught to do. I mean, white people call 911 because their neighbors making noise, the trash cans the wrong place. There's a squirrel, a dead squirrel in the yard. We call 911 for everything. So, you know, as that progressed as our way of being, the police budget grew and grew and grew.

00:42:50:01 - 00:43:16:09
Unknown
And when I tell people that the LAPD's budget has grown 52% in the last ten years, that's a shocking number because no other line item has done that. Youth development doesn't even register in the graph. It gets so little. Yet here we are concerned about youth coming from other neighborhoods and stealing our belongings. Yet we give no money to youth development.

00:43:16:11 - 00:43:55:13
Unknown
I also think that, you know, there's an avoidance of accountability. Interestingly enough, a carceral system perpetuates lack of accountability. It makes it easy to not be accountable. We don't make people accountable. We just lament. We don't make them change anything. We and we don't make the system change anything. Why were we so carceral? Why are we so focused on punishment and more punishment?

00:43:55:15 - 00:44:20:03
Unknown
I think there is a there's a combination of things. we were pretty much on par with the rest of the world and I'm talking by the rest of the world. I'm talking about, you know, mostly industrialized democracies until the early seventies and then by the by the late seventies, early eighties, the conversation around crime became very politicized.

00:44:20:04 - 00:44:48:10
Unknown
Right. And there were political candidates who really found a path to elections and to grabbing the attention of voters. At the same time, we started to experience an increase in the use of narcotics. And then by the early eighties were Cleveland. The epidemic of crack and, you know, the wars that were being caused by gangs. And then we engaged in this whole concept of the war on drugs.

00:44:48:16 - 00:45:12:13
Unknown
And as we became more fearful and it became more politicized, we became more carceral, It was like we couldn't get enough of it. Right. We we sort of went into it drinking veins, you know, about, you know, believing that the more carceral that we were, the more punitive that we weren't, the more safety we can achieve. A lot of was a result of people being fearful.

00:45:12:13 - 00:45:42:06
Unknown
But but I think more than anything also was the what I consider the unethical manipulation of information by people that were, you know, involving race for political office. And then I think that as that process started to prove that's a good path for successful, you know, outcomes in electoral races, we also started to develop an industry around this, right?

00:45:42:06 - 00:46:15:08
Unknown
So, you know, we started to have more prisons being built. The concept where private prisons surfaced, we started to create larger and larger police departments. We started to increase the resources that were being placed in this entire mechanism around policing, prosecution and incarceration. When three strikes came into operationally in the state of California, where incarceration rates, one skyrocketed.

00:46:15:08 - 00:46:45:01
Unknown
You know, we we went from if you consider at the beginning of the 1970s, we were incarcerating under 30,000 people in the state of California or in the state prison system. And by the 1997, after three strikes, we were up to 180, 180,000 people. And, you know, we use I want to say we people use strategically very tragic events to create this very draconian laws.

00:46:45:03 - 00:47:24:18
Unknown
And, you know, and so I think that it was a combination of politics, economics and fear. And they all came together. And, you know, frankly, one of my fears is we're kind of in that place today in many ways. How do you get the community to move away from an ideology of punishment to thinking differently? So, you know, when we've grown up on the mountains and, you know, all the cop shows, like 50% of fictional content on TV in a year is is crime shows, right?

00:47:24:20 - 00:47:45:19
Unknown
Something like 30% of all content that we consume is crime. So between the news, between like reality shows on crime, between fictional crime detective stories, all of this that we consume huge amount of crime content. We have cop Lego, we have the perpetual dog, and then we have the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And this has been a long term like symbol of Canada, the RCMP myth.

00:47:45:19 - 00:48:07:15
Unknown
This like the red coat, the horses. But the RCMP is actually, of course, formed as the North-West Mounted Police, the Northwest being the frontier. And so they're putting down Indigenous people, they're committing genocide on Indigenous people, they're pushing white settlement out to the north. You know all of this. So this is a social idea and it's very hard to get people to move from that like common sense idea that we need the police.

00:48:07:15 - 00:48:47:08
Unknown
The police stop bad guys. If we get rid of the police, there'll be crime all over the place, Right? So we're like, you have to have that conversation. The police and their supporters are actively produce seeing all kinds of positive misrepresentations of policing. Some of the earliest police shows on television were co-produced. The LAPD and some of the most popular, long lasting shows on television, like Cops, are also co-produced by police departments and local media.

00:48:47:08 - 00:49:31:23
Unknown
Television newspapers always seem to treat police sources as above reproach, immediately accept whatever they say as gospel, almost never bring in a critical counter perspective. And in addition, politicians have come to rely on police to solve a whole set of political problems for them to demonize their enemies, to cover up their failures. And so they also have a vested interest in producing these positive narratives about policing that portray police as this thin blue line that separates the good people from the bad people.

00:49:31:23 - 00:50:02:07
Unknown
That is the the force that protects civilization through the seemingly neutral enforcement of a set of laws that somehow magically benefit everyone. And so we are bombarded 24 hours a day with television shows, you know, lionizing police who can do no wrong, who are who, even when they break the rules, they're doing it for the right reasons to to help keep us safe and all the rest.

00:50:02:09 - 00:50:46:21
Unknown
And this both undermines basic concerns about civil liberties, but it also warps our sense what really is necessary to produce safe and healthy communities and in a safe and sustainable society. You know, it just erases the potential of other kinds of interventions that we need to provide real safety and security. Let's just be clear that police, prisons, carceral city, you know, it's started for the express explicit purpose of controlling, enslaving, kidnaping, keeping people oppressed.

00:50:46:21 - 00:51:11:04
Unknown
That is literally we for so to then be like a kinder and gentler class morality. No okay so on you Renee Taylor of the body is not an apology when she's talking about this country and its oppressive system. She uses the analogy of baking a cake and she's saying, well, you can bake the cake once you bake it.

00:51:11:04 - 00:51:41:01
Unknown
If you put too much milk in it, you can't like, take that out. You don't have to throw the cake out. So we got to throw this out, this moment that we've been in the last couple of years following the uprising after the killing of George Floyd has really been about trying to redefine how we produce public safety.

00:51:41:03 - 00:52:11:14
Unknown
When we say abolish the police, we are saying we do not want policing as we know it to exist anymore. What's going to happen if we don't have a basic change in policing? We're going to continue having carnage in the street. America has never been a place where we had democracy and equality and freedom and liberty for all and justice for all.

00:52:11:14 - 00:52:42:11
Unknown
And all we have to do is get back to that. Abolition just is you know, when you put your money where your values are. So you're investing in care, right? You're investing in resources for communities. And that sounds it sounds common sense, but it's not how we're doing things now, right? We've defunded education. We took a hammer to education 50 years ago, and we're living the end result of that.

00:52:42:17 - 00:53:11:07
Unknown
It's a whole shift. All right. We see the connection. It's the whole, like shift from punitive, controlling. I know what's best for you into this reversal, where it's like, what can I do for you? What do you need? I think I know what you know can help you based on what you've shared with me and not having forms of control that are kind of watching you all the time.

00:53:11:09 - 00:53:34:05
Unknown
You know, ankle bracelets, helicopters, cameras, probation officers. That's not needed. If you have, again, this safety net, these people that are going to hold each other accountable to do better. You know what kind of bugs me sometimes is that people take offense to the of defunding the policing. But we felt very comfortable when we started defunding public health in this country.

00:53:34:08 - 00:54:05:10
Unknown
We've become very comfortable with defunding public education and continue to do so. Right. I mean, per capita, when you look you adjust for inflation, you know, invest investments in education, public education are abysmal when compared with other industrialized nations in the world. So we have defunded all sorts of, you know, safety nets, if you will. We have less public housing per capita today than we did in the 1980s.

00:54:05:12 - 00:54:42:06
Unknown
And people wonder why is homelessness is such a big not only is an issue of affordability, but we actually have taking a lot of public housing stock rising. So there's been a lot of the funding going on for years of what a lot of other systems and a lot of the funding shifted to policing, prisons and prosecutions. And I think that to the extent that we need to right size the the criminal legal system and move some of that funding into some of this other areas, I think is critical that we have serious conversations around where and when you do that.

00:54:42:06 - 00:55:20:15
Unknown
You're not giving up safety. Actually, you're increasing the likelihood of safety, but to get rid of policing altogether or even to shrink it to the point that they become totally ineffective. I totally disagree with that. So we wanted public engagement and we really pushed for that. So me and then the committee of people I was working with included Terry Ajayi.

00:55:20:19 - 00:55:47:20
Unknown
Harry Critchley, who's now on the police force, is interesting, Jen Taylor, Julia Rogers. And then we had a larger group of people from different community groups. So I think it's perhaps unique. I like to think so. And I think one thing that's unique about it, I mean that it was commissioned by a board, so I think that's interesting that it's an official report, but B, that we really did try to do a bit more fine grained like get into what does it look like?

00:55:47:20 - 00:56:02:22
Unknown
You know, because we've been saying it's not new. The dismantling of the police, the Panthers had it in the ten point plan. Right. But it's one thing to say remove money from the police and give it to housing. It's another thing to talk about. How would that take place? Like who would be involved in that? What level of government would that be?

00:56:03:02 - 00:56:20:20
Unknown
What would that look like? So we did public engagement. We had almost 2500 surveys that people returned when we asked about things like their view of public safety. So we asked about the police, but then we also asked and things like what in your community, what resources do you think? You say, you know, and people said like libraries or sports or whatever, right?

00:56:20:22 - 00:56:41:16
Unknown
So trying to think about what public safety really means, the people. And then in our report, we not only dealt with the issue of defunding, but we treat it as a kind of holistic idea. So our definition is really four pillars that move from internal issues like police, governance policy, police boards, all the way out to things like participatory budgeting in cities.

00:56:41:18 - 00:56:58:05
Unknown
Because of course, if we're talking about defunding the police, how do you allocate that money? So we were talking about how when people actually have a say over the budget and get to say, you know, we're if we take this money from the police, where should it go? If you do a process with people in communities, they I think it should go to this group because we all access them.

00:56:58:10 - 00:57:21:08
Unknown
You know, we use this group online trouble that actually engages people in the political system and shifts also how we feel about our position in democracy. So we really go from the inside all the way out. We try to really create a kind of complete road map. We did 36 recommendations, everything from, you know, addressing use of force to like simple stuff, like the police policy should be available online so we can access them.

00:57:21:11 - 00:57:41:07
Unknown
So we tried to do some of that kind of policy based work to show that this wasn't ponies and fairy dust. You know, that this is very practical. Very quickly. So the first couple of deals with things like police, governance, police boards, making policy, public transparency, accountability, and the second pillar, which is really the heart of defunding, is de tasking.

00:57:41:09 - 00:58:02:19
Unknown
And some people don't like the term defunding. And if you don't like it, DE tasking might be the term for you. And that's simply removing tasks that the police are not equipped for or not appropriate to and putting them in the appropriate agencies. So that includes things like of course the main one is mental health response. This is something that even people who oppose defunding of police like agree that the cops should not be on mental health calls.

00:58:02:19 - 00:58:20:04
Unknown
And this includes the cops, by the way, police themselves say they're traumatized by these calls, that they don't have the training and they don't know what to do. So that's a really obvious one. Cahoots is a model in Oregon that a lot of people are using, which is cop free mental health. So that's the most familiar, most basic kind of idea of de tasking, like let's not have the cops come.

00:58:20:09 - 00:58:36:17
Unknown
You know, another example is things like sobering centers that the police should not be involved in health issues of addiction. They're not trained doctors. If someone's intoxicated in public, they should be going to a site with his medical personnel, not into police cells where they often suffocate on their vomit and die. Right. So that's all part of the tasking.

00:58:36:17 - 00:58:55:14
Unknown
And of course, that can be as broad as small as just things like mental health or as broad as abolishing the police, depending on what you believe in. And then our third piece is around things like legislative and regulatory reforms and changes. So that has to do with a lot of the different levels of government involved in the different ways you deal with police.

00:58:55:14 - 00:59:16:15
Unknown
And then finally, our fourth piece was around the finances. So participatory municipal budgeting, so people having a say over what happens to their budget, but also things like putting money into affordable housing and putting money into like a proper decriminalization plan, putting money into treatment, stuff like that. So then we really looked at community groups and distributing financing.

00:59:16:17 - 00:59:53:12
Unknown
What abolitionists are arguing for is not that we somehow magically eliminate all police tomorrow. First of all, it's not possible that can happen. So why waste our time imagining what would happen if all of a sudden there were no police? Because we don't have the power to do that. And it's not even what people are demanding. What we want is to see new investments in community based strategies to address people's real problems in ways that allow us to reduce our reliance on policing.

00:59:53:14 - 01:00:25:19
Unknown
When we say defund the police, we're saying defund the police, invest in the people. Crime is caused by desperation. Desperation is caused by poverty. So you have poverty which feeds desperation. Criminal behavior also feeds mental health. You cannot talk about crime without talking about mental health, but people do it all the time. You cannot talk about crime without talking about poverty, but people do it all the time.

01:00:25:19 - 01:00:51:17
Unknown
There shouldn't be a war on crime. They should be a war on poverty. Healthy resourced communities are safe communities, and they feel safe and they have a sense of restorative justice just by nature of being healthy resource communities. You know, I've even been in a police commission meeting where this sitting chief of police said the safest way to live is to know your neighbors.

01:00:51:19 - 01:01:35:23
Unknown
You get resources to those places. You know, you start pumping more money into the bloated punishment bureaucracy. Here in L.A., it's 3.2 billion. It's over that now over $8.2 million every day that we're pumping into the police department. Yes, LAPD, lots of that could be going to housing, too, doing something about the crumbling schools. That's criminal. Jenee, you want to reduce crime, help kids get the high school diplomas that are worth something, You know, allocate resources to that rather than to this bloated police department.

01:01:36:00 - 01:01:53:13
Unknown
And I'm a practical abolitionist, right? Like, I mean, I actually do work in prisons, so I deal with people every single day in prison. I always say life is long, you know, quite literally in prison, a life sentence is a long sentence. And any time you're working in prison, you have to with prisoners are organizing with prison, nothing happens immediately.

01:01:53:13 - 01:02:13:06
Unknown
You know, somebody is wrongfully convicted. You can all know it. It is still going to take years to get that person out. So you really have to take the long view, I think. And then, you know, we're not ready. I always say this to that. This is something that Dr. Rachel Zeller says as well. Like even if aliens came down tomorrow and zapped every prisoner, removed every police force like we had ready, we don't know how to deal with conflict.

01:02:13:11 - 01:02:32:22
Unknown
We haven't organized ourselves to deal with harm. Harm is real. The black woman who invented transformative justice didn't invent it as a method because they were naive about harm. They're all victims of sexual violence in childhood, incest, and they understood that the systems that we have, the court systems and police actually do nothing to end gender based violence of domestic violence or rape.

01:02:32:22 - 01:02:50:13
Unknown
Right. That that has to come from social change and it has to come from educating each other, intervening. But, you know, we're not capable of that yet because we live in a policing society where we're taught to defer all problems to the police like that supposed to be our first call. So do you know what to do if someone in your apartment building is experiencing abuse, you don't want to call the police?

01:02:50:15 - 01:03:11:23
Unknown
Are you organized? Do you have a group of people that's trained in that intervention? Where would you take that person who's being abused? You know, where are safe places, you know, where the shelters are? What if the shelters fall? What if they're not picking up the phone? How do you go and do that intervention? These are things that we need to train ourselves in.

01:03:12:00 - 01:03:34:14
Unknown
When you begin to think differently and you begin to look at people through the eyes of the humanity all of us and, you know, sort of that love for humankind, your thinking and your approach to the work is starts to be very different, right I mean, we may be unhappy with our kids, right? We may not like a lot of the things that they do.

01:03:34:16 - 01:04:05:00
Unknown
But intrinsically, most of us come from a place of love and therefore our interventions and the way that we deal with the stuff we don't like is generally going to be influenced by that love. Right? And that caring, if we take the same approach to our neighbors and other in other communities that do not necessarily look at look like we do, then the the approach to the work is it invariably will take a different turn.

01:04:05:01 - 01:04:27:15
Unknown
And I believe deeply in the cop said that bringing love to the equation and not in a simplistic way, but loving it, you know, love for humankind, love for humanity. I think that when you do that, you begin to to alter your way of how do you resolve those annoying things and little things that we don't like and those things are, quite frankly, could be harmful.

01:04:27:17 - 01:05:07:18
Unknown
A lot of people don't realize we were talking about evolution. Is that we really talking about the fact that we want you to be be a decent person, that that is going to require that you relate to people, that you have conversations with, people that you talk to your neighbor and don't call the police on them and stop being passive aggressive, which is going to require that you actually deal which know trauma and your baggage that got you actually dysfunctional in your personal relationships and not able to set boundaries like all of that.

01:05:07:18 - 01:05:39:16
Unknown
And so I think that's a part of the secret, and we haven't tapped into that in abolition and in racial justice. So we're having these conversations that are very cerebral and in our head and we're talking about policy and how you vote and all of this other stuff. And what I am asserting is that, like you have to get your old self together, understand why you are so invested in revenge punishment.

01:05:39:18 - 01:06:21:18
Unknown
You know why you need to bully your children. Why why you know all of this and why you need to feel like you're better than someone else. Or what made you feel small? What hurt you and harmed you? And so now you have to, you know, police, other human beings, you we're here at our location in the South Bronx, blocks away from where our founding members grew up.

01:06:21:20 - 01:06:47:21
Unknown
This is Wildflower, New York Charter School. It's a montessori school. It's the only true Montessori school in the Bronx is very special. So when you talk to people who are from affluent backgrounds, right, they went to Montessori schools and their mouth always drops when when I say we have a montessori school because it's like you're teaching these methods to kids in the Bronx for free.

01:06:47:23 - 01:07:11:12
Unknown
You know how much my parents spent on a montessori education. So that's huge for us when we talk about our heroes. You know, our kids are looking at Fred Hampton, our kids are looking at Andrew Lloyd Davis and Assata Shakur. They're learning experiences definitely different. So what we have is five year olds, kindergartners who are doing multiplication it's exceptional.

01:07:11:14 - 01:07:39:01
Unknown
A lot of things that black opportunities does are modeled after the Black Panther Party because we feel as though they had the right idea. The Black Panthers were a bottom up revolutionary organization, meaning they fought to see change in their communities and then they fought higher level fight for the people. But they were revolutionaries, you know, they were abolitionists.

01:07:39:03 - 01:08:01:00
Unknown
That's who we are. We teach community because you know how Wolf's running PAC, We take care of each other. They hunt together, they eat together, they do everything together. We're trying to teach de I mean, very basic level. You know, if you look at where the Wildflower Charter School is, we're in a harder to hold, not even two blocks, not even a quarter of a mile away.

01:08:01:02 - 01:08:28:13
Unknown
There is ten, 12 blocks of project buildings. There's 40,000 impoverished people concentrated in a space that is I don't know if, you know, ten, 12 city blocks. We serve those people. We see those people. We go in and clean out the staircases. We have summer youth workers, which is about ten young people who are paid by the city to work in businesses.

01:08:28:15 - 01:09:08:03
Unknown
We take them out and show them how to report hazardous or dirty commit conditions in these communities and the city responds to it. It's not that our people aren't concerned about what's happening to them. They just don't know how to fight back. And we do. So we're going to help in abolition when people's needs are met. People don't need to go into other communities and steal the right restorative justice are popping up all over the place.

01:09:08:03 - 01:09:41:11
Unknown
The most successful one I think I've seen is is in Chicago. And part of that is because they have they also have interrupt ours in Chicago. They have violence prevention workers that will go out before a crime is being committed like people will call their grandma MOSS. Right. These are these are women who, again, because they garner a certain amount of respect and are able to go in as folks are fighting something is happening and deescalate, diffuse, diffuse things.

01:09:41:11 - 01:10:03:07
Unknown
Right. You're actually able I don't know if it's still running, but you were able to choose a restorative justice path if you were a victim of a crime in Chicago. So what is restorative justice? I Think there are a lot of definitions out there. So I don't want to be the the sole kind of provider of the definitive answer to that.

01:10:03:07 - 01:10:44:01
Unknown
But to me, restorative justice is a second chance. You know, restorative justice is also a way for, you know, typically what you'll see is a person who was committed to harm and someone else who has been affected by the harm caused to have a dialog, have a discussion. And for that opportunity to be that person that committed the harm, to make amends, to repair as much as possible to give back, and more than anything, really understand what they've done and try to change their behaviors.

01:10:44:01 - 01:11:10:09
Unknown
But I think it's also, again, tied back to giving dignity back and humanity back to that person that's committed to harm and not imposing punitive sentences on them or a harsh kind of punishment. It's about, you know, giving them a chance to really come into contact with with this other person and see them as a human being, hear their story.

01:11:10:11 - 01:11:31:15
Unknown
And so it's also a chance for that person was harmed to have a say in what this other person can do to to make things better. You know, the biggest question I'm asked about abolition is what do we do with violent offenders? Right? That's what keeps coming up. I'm deep canvasing it doors and white neighborhoods and almost everybody can agree that our carceral system does not work.

01:11:31:17 - 01:12:06:13
Unknown
Jail is not a solution for our social problems anymore. You know, that's not making us any safer, any healthier. But this violent offender peace keeps coming up. And if you've ever talked to folks, victims of violent crimes, they're seldom made whole by the system we have now. In fact, they're often traumatized again and again, especially victims of domestic violence or sexual assault, like they're more than not, not believed, not seriously, certainly not aided in any way by our system.

01:12:06:15 - 01:12:35:02
Unknown
That's one of the things I'd like to see are all of our movement partners and our folks on the ground who are pretty much doing the city's job Now. We need to start building those those new systems of care, because if we can show folks what we'll be replacing it with, with something tangible, you will have more and more people on our side and our campaign definitely should prove that point because I had no name recognition.

01:12:35:04 - 01:12:59:16
Unknown
I got in on the last day and I had no money and we still took 7% of the vote and tied a sitting city council person who was in state assembly. So there is an appetite for this. There is an appetite for this change. This is not some kind of abstract utopian envisioning that this is a very practical programmatic intervention.

01:12:59:18 - 01:13:26:23
Unknown
So if we really want to save lives, one of the things we could do is to send someone other than police, to send trained mental health workers, outreach workers, social workers, often together as an outreach team who can respond to someone in crisis. A number of cities are doing this now from Eugene, Oregon, to Denver, Colorado, to Houston, Texas.

01:13:27:01 - 01:14:01:19
Unknown
This is working. They're diverting nine one, one calls, No one's getting arrested and no one is getting killed in these encounters. And in Denver, where they've had a very robust program for over a year now, they've not requested police assistance a single time on these calls. On an individual level, this is what my my abolition starts. I hope it starts with my children.

01:14:01:19 - 01:14:26:03
Unknown
So some people that might have a problem with this. I did not teach my children to call the police. We do not do that. And I put systems and tools in place so they don't have to call the police. If I pass out, they can call Nana, they can they can contact their uncle, they can call the neighbor.

01:14:26:03 - 01:14:54:20
Unknown
They don't need to call the police. We need to do a wellness check or whatever. We don't need to bring the police out here for this situation. And we can do this as a community and teaching children what is appropriate. I had a neighbor that was killed by Inglewood PD about 15 years ago and he was in a he was having a mental health crisis.

01:14:54:20 - 01:15:44:09
Unknown
He was spiraling. We we all saw it happening, but we didn't know what to do. And I think about the fact that he would be alive if somebody had just called his mom, but we didn't have her contact information. So we are going to have to talk to another we are going to have to be neighbors. We're going to have to get uncomfortably close and at minimum, know who people belong to, who know who your momma is and your cousin is, and have their contact information so that if something is happening that we can call them, or that if there's some suspicious activity at the house and I know you're on vacation, that I can

01:15:44:09 - 01:16:10:11
Unknown
reach out to this person and they can come and check on it, or that I have the authority come and look as opposed to calling the police for every single thing. And I think that it's home by home, family by family, building by building, block by block, community by community coming together to say instead of calling the police, we call each we create a phone tree.

01:16:10:12 - 01:17:06:16
Unknown
And if the kids are in the alley making too much noise past midnight, we got people that will come and say, okay, now that's enough. It works. It works. It's actually working. And not just with nuisance and minor instances, but in life or death situations. A lot of where I'm coming from is the importance of theory of frameworks, of big picture when we're approaching these problems so that we are resilient, when when the inevitable happens, for instance, when we enact criminal justice reform on a mass scale, there will be some cases in which people who will see this less retributive treatment, less punitive treatment are going to get out sooner than they otherwise would have,

01:17:06:18 - 01:17:30:17
Unknown
and they're going to hurt somebody. They're going to commit a crime. And it's sometimes it may be a very serious crime. By the same token, we know that any policy we pursue is going to have risks associated with. And when those risks are realized, we have to have a response. We can't let that become that outlier, become the basis for fear mongering.

01:17:30:19 - 01:18:14:22
Unknown
We have to say, yes, you know, there is a price we're going to pay as a society to be more humane, to be more just to be more fair. But fairness has a price isn't free, right? Equality isn't free, and criminality is constantly being redefined and changing based on the whims of white supremacy. And and so what separates me from a criminal, you know, nothing.

01:18:15:00 - 01:18:43:21
Unknown
Nothing. And so what I what I want to say is that we really need to think a little bit more collectively and individually about the language that we're using and the way that, again, we use we use certain terms and language to really make other people. One of the things I like to talk about is that we love this language of imagination and I know why, but I think sometimes I think we should move away from it.

01:18:43:21 - 01:19:10:17
Unknown
We go, Imagine the world because we make it sound like it's only imaginary. And in fact it's very practical in COVID in my province and in the first wave of COVID, we let out 41% of provincially incarcerated people. So nearly half. And there was no crime wave. It costs almost $300 to keep people in prison in jail for one day, and it costs 125 to put people in fully supportive housing with access to social work, groceries And so we point to that and say that was practical, that happened.

01:19:10:17 - 01:19:33:03
Unknown
That's not something we imagined that actually happened. Like we effectively decarceration almost half our population. So if we can do it, it shows you that prison is the myth. The myth is that we need all these people in jail, all they be running around the streets and that's not true. So I really tried to shift us from believing that defunding is radical, to recognizing that what is actually radical is investing billions of dollars into policing.

01:19:33:08 - 01:19:53:21
Unknown
What is radical is giving police force tanks and semi-automatics. And like in the states, especially, where you give them like discarded weaponry, like decommissioned weaponry, like literally from the war in Iraq, like that is radical. It is radical to defund your education and health care systems that you can't even have, like people in the emergency room doing COVID or like enough nurses in the long term care homes.

01:19:53:21 - 01:20:18:03
Unknown
You had people working in multiple spreading COVID. And that's why so many of our elders died. That is rad to get rid of the social compact that has existed for generations and strip all of that and then fill gap by just funding the police more and more, giving them SWAT teams or as we call them IRT teams, giving them that, giving them more weapons, giving them more powers, increasing what they do that involving them in schools is extremely radical.

01:20:18:03 - 01:20:36:09
Unknown
To have your child going to school and have a cop there, like we should recognize that as a radical social shift. That's not the status quo. So I really push us to talk about that. So like not agree that defunding the police is this radical lefty, like communist, Marxist, whatever, that is actually practical. It's good social policy. It makes sense.

01:20:36:09 - 01:22:58:01
Unknown
And here's a road map to it. Everybody stand up and.