Top Quotes: “Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit of Freedom” — Derecka Purnell
“Most victims of law enforcement violence survive. No hashtags or protests or fires for the wounded, assaulted, and intimidated.
In 2020, Minneapolis Police officer Derek Chauvin pinned George Floyd to the concrete as he hollered that be could not breathe. Floyd screamed. He screamed for his mother. He screamed for his breath. For his life. Until he died nine minutes later. Calls for “justice” quickly ensued. I often wonder, What if the cop who killed George Floyd had kneeled on Floyd’s neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds instead of nine minutes? Floyd would have lived to be arrested, prosecuted, and imprisoned for allegedly attempting to use a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill. Is that justice? I didn’t think so. Too often, the public calls for justice when Black people are killed by the police, and ignores the daily injustice if the victims live.”
“What’s sad is that people claim that poor, Black communities need the police the most to protect them, but this is not quite true. Capitalists need policing the most — to protect their property, billions, businesses, and borders, by arresting the people whom they’ve exploited, excluded, and extracted from the most.”
“Before the Irish were considered “white” in the US, they experienced policing as colonial subjects under Britain. Then, when they migrated to the United States, police targeted and arrested them so much that police vans are still called “paddy wagons,” a derogatory use of the popular Irish name “Padraig.””
“I told my class about a Black freshman who had asked his high school principal permission to sit under “the white tree” in the school’s yard. The principal said yes, assuring him that anyone at the school could sit in the shade. The morning after the boy and his friends sat under the tree, three nooses appeared on its branches, hung there by white students. Federal prosecutors refused to prosecute the white teens for a hate crime. For punishment, a local cop scolded that the white boys “should be ashamed of themselves.” The school district overruled the principal’s recommendation to expel the white, boys, who received supervised suspensions. Brian Purvis, one of the Jena Six, explained that Black students and families protested and held demonstrations every day after the noose incident for weeks. This angered and agitated white students and fights ensued. Purvis wrote in My Story as a Jena 6: “It was so bad, there were at least two cops and a dog in every hallway throughout the school. Our school was now like a prison.”
Racial violence continued in the town of three thousand souls. Black boys were invited to a party that had a “No Niggers Allowed” sign on the door. A white man punched one of them in the face, and later tried to shoot the boy during a confrontation. The boy and his friends took the man’s gun from him. Some of the same Black boys who survived the racial violence from the party and gun incident were then accused of beating up a white boy at school. Police cuffed them and put them in jail. The “Jena Six” were charged with attempted murder because one of the boys used what the prosecutor argued was a deadly weapon: a sneaker. District attorneys have the power to charge widely and harshly, though the same prosecutor had said, months earlier, that he could not find any hate crime charges to prosecute the white kids for the nooses. He additionally charged the Black boy for defending himself against the white man whose gun he took. Purvis was not there during the school fight, but he was prosecuted anyway.
The boys’ parents raised awareness about the charges and the death threats they received. In 2007, more than twenty thousand people packed Jena, creating the largest civil rights protest in a decade. Prosecutors relented and dropped or reduced the charges.”
“Mexicans were not the initial impetus for “illegal immigration,” it was Chinese immigrants. In Amnesty or Abolition, historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez explains that white slave owners tried to preserve their economic power by importing Chinese contract laborers to replace enslaved Black people near the end of the Civil War. Congress banned the Chinese immigrants to prevent the emergence of new forms of slavery. Abolitionist Frederick Douglass called the importation the start of an “Asiatic-slave trade” and opposed Congress’s actions because it criminalized the Chinese immigrants instead of the exploitative white Americans. The ban was foundational to the expansion of later immigration bans, law enforcement, border patrol, prisons, and detention centers for other immigrants.”
“White people feared rebellion and the threat of it so much because it destroyed their lives, property, and money, Policing in South Carolina consequently required a united front to stop Black people. In the late 1600s, officials there legally mandated that every white man between sixteen and sixty to join the militia, and legally empowered every white person to arrest, punish, and return runaways. White civilians were not only encouraged to monitor and control Black people, but were required to do so sometimes under the threat of being fined. The government criminalized people for not policing. As slavery spread, resistance spread, and these policing duties transcended geography and, ultimately, time. Policing was not just found in the formal duties of the patrol and the militias, but also in the lives of everyday white people to control subordinate populations whose freedom threatened their lives, property, and ego. I was learning that white people had been historically conditioned to control the behaviors of others, from the white woman who grabbed me at the Kris Kobach rally in Kansas to George Zimmerman when he stalked Trayvon Martin and Michael Dunn when he killed Jordan Davis; from the white people who held their guns to Black Hurricane Katrina survivors to the armed militias who patrol the Arizona border.”
“More than 10 percent of people sitting in cages in South Carolina’s county facilities are there for child support back payments; most are economically exploited Black men who cannot afford a lawyer for their freedom and don’t have their freedom long enough for steady employment.”
“Many jurors are sold on the mainstream belief that cops put their lives on the line every day for our safety, when actually, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the jobs with the highest fatal work injuries include fishers and hunters, grounds maintenance workers, construction workers, roofers, and tradespeople like my father.”
“The protests, marches, rallies, and festivals that the Don’t Shoot Coalition planned were incredible. Thousands of people participated in dancing, artistic actions, block parties, and theater performances between St. Louis City and North St. Louis County. Several activists who protested in the Ferguson Uprising in 2014 returned to support the celebration and ongoing resistance efforts. By late summer 2015, activists were still occupying parts of Ferguson to protest police violence, making St. Louis a site for one of the longest continually held demonstrations in the history of the United States, rivaling the 381-day-long Montgomery Bus Boycott that started in 1955.”
“Shooters in the tanks fired rubber bullets and canisters directly at people and cars, including the one that I was in. Block by block, the St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department catapulted cocktails of chemical agents against the entire Fountain Park neighborhood for hours. Police attacked residents sitting on their porches. They gassed park-goers who were completely unaware of the gathering. Clouds of smoke from the regular tear gas hindered visibility for people who ran and drove. Several school-bus drivers panicked and dropped kids off at incorrect stops. I took pictures of some blasted tear-gas canisters and uploaded them on Facebook; they were the most toxic kind, CS, that causes vomiting, skin burning, immediate closure of the eyes, and heightened sensitivity from repetitive exposure. A veteran online told me that it could melt contacts in your eyes.”
“Historically, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France heavily recruited and coerced Africans to fight in their wars and labor in their cities. Between World War I and the 1970s, millions of Africans went to these countries as a result. By the economic recession in the 1970s, many European nations started closing their borders to the Black and brown immigrants whose labor they had been exploiting for decades.”
“The Netherlands increased police power to question and apprehend people they suspect to be undocumented, akin to Arizona’s SB 1070 racial profiling law that I had protested against in college. Moroccan youth are less than 2 percent of the population, yet Dutch police have charged more than half of them with one or more criminal offenses by the time they are twenty-three years old.”
“For decades under apartheid, the Dutch and the English dispossessed Black South Africans of their homes and land and sold it cheaply to white farmers, and gave it away in many instances. As of 2019, South Africa was 90 percent Black, but 72 percent of the land owned by individuals was owned by white people.”
“Belinda Sutton was a Black woman who was once owned by Isaac Royall. Royall was a slave owner who bequeathed the money that founded Harvard Law School. Belinda Sutton sued for a pension when Royall fled the country during the Revolutionary War. She won, which may be the first successful case of reparations in Massachusetts history.”
“Slavery started threatening the profits in the North’s industrial sectors and had to be stopped. Northern industry’s promise of expansion prevailed over slavery’s proven longevity, and large capitalists wanted to abolish slavery so that they could exploit the labor of free Blacks alongside poor and working-class whites. It was more profitable for companies if they hired workers and paid them a wage because workers sell their labor for income, and then use that income to purchase goods and services. Slaves had no income and could not purchase anything. Black people were a reservoir of laborers and potential consumers. Because of the war, industrialization was spreading quickly and capitalists wanted to grow their wealth by hiring more workers.
Additionally, Northern industrialist abolitionists also wanted freedom and suffrage for Black people because it gave capitalists critical voting power in the South. Industrial capitalists ruled the Republican Party. They planned to prevent the Democratic Party from regaining political control in the South to reinstitute slavery. Ninety percent of Black people lived in the South at the end of the Civil War. With the power of their vote, Black people could presumably stop the rebirth of slavery and help the industrial Republican Party stay in power.”
“I wondered about the seeming incongruence between approaches to prisons and police. Cutting the prison population in half was exactly the right idea, but were we going to keep nearly one million cops to keep locking people up? Leave almost eighteen thousand law enforcement agencies untouched? Permit them to make tens of millions of arrests for jails that we were closing?”
“Rachel helped me distill police abolition into an organizing praxis: make policing obsolete by reducing the police, reducing the reasons why people need police, reducing the reasons why people think they need police, and building a society where we have just relationships to each other, to our labor, to our communities, and to our planet.”
“A New York Times feature found that only 4 percent of police calls in three major jurisdictions were for “serious violent offenses,” and hovered below 2 percent in other cities with available data, including Baltimore, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and Seattle. This is just one way we can use 911 data, neighborhood surveys and relationships, and our own needs to assess, reduce, and eliminate the reasons people call police, and build what we need instead.”
“Instead of cops, cities could have various housing, healthcare, and employment options to meet the needs of people experiencing homelessness. An intermediate step could be organizing strong tenants’ unions to ensure that properties are safe and attractive, to end evictions, and stop the use of discriminatory methods that ban applicants with records. Long-term, community members and organizers could brainstorm and experiment with cooperative land stewardship.”
“Black people from former British colonies in the Caribbean arrived in the United Kingdom to fill postwar labor shortages between 1948 and 1971. Because they lived in British colonies, the government considered them British subjects or citizens until 2018, when lawmakers decided that without paperwork, they faced deportation.”
“Abolition requires us to reduce violence as we are reducing the carceral responses to it.
Nobody wrote “Black on Black crime” or “senseless violence.” All of the violence in our communities made perfect sense.”
“Before he was imprisoned, BPP leader Alprentice “Bunchy” Carter was a notorious leader of the Slauson gang. After he met Black Panthers and members of the Nation of Islam in prison, he acquired a political understanding of racism and capitalism. Upon his exit from prison, he helped transform thousands of gang members into activists. Bunchy enrolled in UCLA while he was leading the local Black Panther chapter in LA. He and another Black Panther, John Huggins, were killed on campus after the FBI intentionally sowed discord between the Panthers and another Black organization that the shooters belonged to. Former Panther Elaine Brown explains that the government facilitated the assassination and the only people who LAPD arrested that day were members of the Black Panther Party. Per Brown, the LAPD had murdered a Black Panther member every month and arrested one every day. The shooters escaped the country.”
“Organizations like LIVE FREE, Taller Salud, and Cure Violence build relationships with residents who are most likely to kill or be killed by gun violence. Interrupters are trained to deescalate volatile situations, relocate potential targets to safety, organize truces between rivalries, and care for the families of those slain. In St. Louis, churches, nonprofits, and municipal offices host annual events where anyone can sell their guns and clear their warrants, no questions asked. Street violent interrupters and activists campaigning to reduce police budgets and departments have an incredible opportunity to work together to reduce community-based harm. Reductions in police budgets could fund noncarceral employment for the most exploited residents and increase the number of violence interrupters working without the police.”
“Tenants can unionize and put pressure on their landlords to maintain any and all units, ramping up the level of organizing that the residents of Grenfell Tower used against their landlord in London. This way, landlords decrease harassment or evictions against individual renters who report grievances, which often happens to people of color, peopie with little means, and immigrants. For decades, Tenants and Workers United have been organizing thousands of low-income renters in Northern Virginia against evictions, rent increases, landlord abuse. The organization accomplished its ten-year campaign for nearly 300 housing units that are cooperatively owned and “democratically controlled by predominately low-income residents.” Cooperatively owned and democratically operated projects can more equitably spread resources for everyone; which minimizes inequality and the violence that can accompany it.”
“Cities and states could require their contracts to use cooperatively owned companies with particular emphasis on those that are created by Black, Indigenous, disabled and queer workers. Worker-owned firms can be significantly less exploitative than large (and small) capitalist corporations because they create and spread wealth for all of the employees. By design, workers who own the former are usually more interested in maintaining long-term operations for employment, better working conditions, and benefits that everyone can enjoy, instead of highly selective perks for a few people at the top.”
“US soldiers cannot legally use tear gas in war, but police officers are granted free rein to use it against protesters.”
“Since 2005, more than five thousand cops have been arrested for sexual violence, misconduct, and child pornography possession, among other offenses; only four hundred lost their badges.”
“For obvious reasons, consent is nearly impossible to give freely when a cop cuffs you and you want to avoid jail. More than half of the states permit or do not prohibit sexual intercourse between a cop and someone in their custody.”
“Between protests in response to Trayvon’s death and the peak of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2016, the number of total cops dropped nationwide for the first time in sixteen years. Applications were down, early retirements were up. And contrary to what I would have assumed before I began organizing and lawyering, the rate of reported violent crime has been shrinking, too.”
“Common Justice operates the first “alternative-to-incarceration and victim-service program in the United States that focuses on violent felonies in the adult courts.” In New York City where Common Justice operates, 90 percent of survivors of violence choose their restorative justice process over sending someone to prison. All over the country, smaller independent restorative and transformative processes occur to varying degrees of success. However, because they are usually private to protect the parties involved, rarely do people talk publicly about how wonderful their individual processes went.”
“According to the National Center for Women and Policing: “Two studies have found that at least 40 percent of police officer families experience domestic violence, in contrast to 10 percent of families in the general population. A third study of older and more experienced officers found a rate of 24 percent, indicating that domestic violence is two to four times more common among police families than American families in general.””
“The Harriet Tubman Collective’s submission critiqued the first version of the M4BL platform because it omitted disability justice when half of the people who police kill have disabilities.”
“Inside the facility, my grandmother became blind and was diagnosed with breast cancer. Dustin laughed when I told him that that did not stop her from having boyfriends that she would sneak off with inside. “Really, Grandma?” I said after the facility called and said she had temporarily gone missing. “Child, I am grown!” she cackled back.”
“For more than three decades, the Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets (CAHOOTS) program in Eugene, Oregon, has handled nearly 20 percent of the city’s 911 calls without police. CAHOOTS is staffed by a local clinic and dispatches unarmed, non-law enforcement medics and crisis workers for mental health-related crises, including conflict resolution, welfare checks, substance abuse, suicide threats, and more, relying on trauma-informed de-escalation and harm-reduction techniques. More than 60 percent of CAHOOTS’s clients are homeless, and “30% live with severe and persistent mental illness (SPMI).” In 2019, they responded to twenty-four thousand calis and called for police backup 150 times — less than 1 percent of the time. Other cities are following Eugene’s lead, cities as large as San Francisco and Los Angeles. While these programs can be a step toward reducing our reliance on police, they are not necessarily abolitionist. The cities that have these alternatives will still use cops for evictions or to respond to theft, sexual violence, etc. Which is why it is especially important to undermine the conditions that give rise to violence and displacement in the first place.”
“Cops will not and cannot stop the underlying causes of these waves of violence caused by the flood of corporate, state, and human pollution that warms the Earth and poisons us.
Heat bakes industrial chemicals and metals into our soil, water, plants, and animals. Paint on our homes and playgrounds peel and expose us to toxins that make us sick with preventable illnesses. Coastlines are swallowing islands due to melting ice caps and oceans fill with waste from crude oil and cruise lines. Rather than protecting us, laws will continue to protect the rights of companies to destroy the Earth for profit.”
“Compared to cities with fewer Black migrants, local governments in Great Migration cities spent a larger share of public expenditures on police, increased the number of cops, and increased incarceration rates. They did not increase pub services as fire-fighting, education, income-based programs, or job programs. Derenoncourt explains that these political and economic spending decisions under the Great Migration contributes to a 43 percent of the “upward mobility gap between black and white men in the region today.” Migration was not the problem; it was the local government’s response.”
“Dust bowl scenes mimicked Old Testament plagues. Men in cities cornered and clubbed to death hundreds of thousands of rabbits. Thousands of grasshoppers would swarm crops at a time. The government bought cattle from farmers as economic relief but killed half of them because they could not be consumed by people. This heat wave was not simply a natural disaster, but a consequence of settler colonialism. According to meteorologist and climate specialist Jeff Berardelli, the federal government gifted or cheaply sold land to entice settlers to the Midwest. The settlers destroyed the deeply rooted Native grasslands by setting up wheat and cattle farms to meet the demand for meat and bread. During droughts, the Native grasslands usually maintained enough moisture to offset the heat in the summer. Settlers disrupted this environmental chain with their harmful farming practices and the Great Plains suffered when droughts hit during the 1930s because winds removed millions of tons of topsoil that had been covered by the grasslands. Thousands of people died from “dust pneumonia,” heat strokes, and more.
Millions of people fled west to escape death and destruction. California criminalized poverty by passing state laws that banned people from entering who were poor and punished anyone living in California who tried to help climate migrants cross. Officials directed police and prosecutors to threaten and arrest migrants and their supporters. Police did what police do.”
“Researchers have found that “the more natural hazard damages accrue in a county, the more wealth white residents tend to accumulate, all else equal. Blacks, on the other hand, tend to lose wealth as local hazard damages increase.” White disaster survivors in places like Joplin, where the population is nearly 85 percent white, accumulate more wealth than Black disaster survivors, and even more wealth. Increased wealth for white people could increase access to relief such as housing, school, health care, and clean air; and decreased wealth for Black people following disastrous storms could equate to precarious living arrangements, employment, and health outcomes.”
“In February 2017, the state paid four thousand prisoners less than two dollars an hour to extinguish wildfires. Then state attorney general Kamala Harris’s office opposed the early release of prisoners due to overcrowding because it “would severely impact fire camp participation — a dangerous outcome while California is in the middle of a difficult fire season and severe drought.” When Harris herself found out about the argument, she told the lawyers in her office to stop using it to oppose the release, but not to oppose the release itself.”
“When French settler colonists landed in Louisiana, they destroyed wetlands that absorbed and prevented flooding. Oil companies further destroyed them.”
“Washington’s A Terrible Thing to Waste details how lead causes several different illnesses and can reprogram young, developing brains. Per Washington, the reprogramming can increase aggressive behaviors such as bullying, slow down mental processing, and pass on these mutating genes to the next generations; she and other scientists suggest that lead was the primary cause of the violent crime wave in the 1980s and ’90s. In one study, “childhood blood lead was the single most predictive factor for disciplinary problems and juvenile crime.””
“More than twenty thousand Black children at the time had tested positive for poisoning that was completely preventable. As of 2021, more than one million children in the United States have lead poisoning and 800 million globally, about a third of all children.”
“In the late seventies, states took at least one child from nearly 80 percent of Indigenous families living on reservations. The removal of Indigenous children continues to be a legacy of settler colonialism. Today, they constitute less than 1 percent of all children, but nearly 25 to 50 percent of children removed from families in several states.”
“Every neighborhood would have five quality features: a neighborhood council; free twenty-four-hour childcare; art, mediation, and conflict-resolution centers; a free health clinic; and a green team.”
“Since the 1960s, protests have become more safe for police, yet police violence against civilians continues. Between 1976 and 1998, cops averaged about four hundred “justifiable homicides” every year, and nearly eighty cops were murdered each year in the line of duty. Since the uprisings in 2014, cops average nearly one thousand homicides each year, and the number of cops killed in the line of duty has hovered around forty-eight. Homicides by cops have nearly doubled, while homicides of cops have nearly halved; yet the mainstream notion is that we are in an anti-police environment. This could not be farther from the truth.”
