Dear friends,
Fridays seem to be taking the wiffij back to its roots, to examine policing, public safety, and Black resistance through a critical lens. This is not just a meditation, however; we have to act on what we know.
In The 1619 Project, there’s a chapter called “Fear” by Leslie Alexander and Michelle Alexander. In it, they discuss the way that Black rebellions excite white fear,
even when resistance has been peaceful or purely symbolic.
The hunger strike to protest conditions on Rikers Island — especially the lack of medical care — continues. This week, Stan German, Executive Director of the New York State Defenders Association, reported that one of the more outspoken people participating in the hunger strike was severely beaten after being transferred to a unit filled with gang members; a correction officer had told the gang members that the striker was a snitch.
I will understand if he does not make a visit to the jail complex, as long as he takes some action to intervene in the crisis. Perhaps if I were president, I would know what to do. What I do know is that someone needs to put some pressure on the mayor and the governor to guarantee the safety of health of both workers and those incarcerated on Rikers.
Contact the President and ask him to intervene in the crisis on Rikers Island.
Until reading “Fear,” I had forgotten that the day of George Floyd’s murder was the same day that a white woman called 911 in NYC, falsely claiming that Christian Cooper, a Black man birding in Central Park, was threatening her.
In December, another Black man who loved the outdoors apparently excited white fear.
Peter Bernardo Spencer, 29, a Black Jamaican man, was invited by a white co-worker to join him at a cabin in rural Pennsylvania. Spencer’s body was found on the lawn outside the cabin, riddled with bullets. A least four of the bullets entered his body through his back.
The four white men Spencer was with have been questioned and the investigation is ongoing.
Spencer’s family asked their lawyer to release autopsy photos of Spencer on his social media accounts, employing the same tactic that Emmett Till’s mother used to call attention to his murder in 1955.
Petition your senators to pass the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Law. This action is from Daily Kos.
In the summer of 2020, the New York City Council passed a bill requiring the police department to disclose details about the surveillance technology it uses in a bid for more transparency about how the department uses controversial tools such as facial recognition, drones and so-called “digital stop-and-frisk.” The passage of the Public Oversight of Surveillance Technology (POST) Act was viewed as an incremental but significant step to creating oversight of how law enforcement uses these tools, which in cases like facial recognition, have been found to be prone to error, especially when used to identify people of color.
The POST Act is not enough to protect New Yorkers. The potential for abuse of these technologies is bringing vocal opposition from council members and groups fighting discriminatory police practices.
The mayor has promised to use the technology responsibly.
The NYPD uses facial recognition more than 10,000 times a year, but it claims never, ever to use it as the basis for an arrest. This has let the department avoid judicial scrutiny for more than a decade. But research from Georgetown University Law School’s Clare Garvie disproved the department’s line years ago, showing that in many cases facial recognition is really the main reason someone is arrested.
Adams should be the first to be fighting to dismantle facial recognition and gun detection tech, not praising it. As a police captain and founder of 100 Blacks In Law Enforcement That Care, he fought against department policies that promoted racism, secrecy and unaccountability. But that’s exactly what these technologies do now.
Let the mayor know that he needs a better plan for addressing gun violence. This is a ready-made action.
Eileen Grench’s report, “Youth, Advocates See Pros and Cons in Adams’ Sprawling Public Safety Proposals,” is worth reading. She interviewed young people who understand that Adams’s promise to ‘take down’ teen gang members is messed up.
Alexander, an 18-year-old Brooklynite who has a now-expunged juvenile record that included a gun case, said
“If they’re teenagers, and y’all already arresting them for a charge that they can spend, basically, like the rest of their life in jail. It’s like, you don’t really have no chance to show that they will make a change,” he said. “You’re not really giving them a chance at all.”
He said he didn’t understand why it took being arrested to get him connected with job opportunities and therapy — things he says have changed his life, and which he wishes others could have access to before any contact with law enforcement.
“Instead of sitting here trying to indict us and throw us in jail for the rest of our life, I feel like we should have more opportunities. We shouldn’t have to be arrested and catch a case to see that somebody young needs help,” Alexander added.
Grench also spoke to young people who praised Adams’s promise to spend more on the Summer Youth Employment Program and on Fair Futures, a program that provides life coaching for young people in foster care. Even those who praised the mayor expressed fear about policing that sounds like “martial law.”
In “Fear,” Alexander and Alexander link the “reflexive impulse” to over-policing and harsh punitive treatment of Black people to the history of desperate efforts
to control a large unfree population who refused to submit to their enslavement. . . . Modern-day policing, surveillance, and mass criminalization, as well as white vigilante violence and “know-your-place aggression,” have histories rooted in white fear — not merely of Black crime or Black people but of Black liberation.
Police violence continues to be major concern around the nation.
Moms Rising is collecting stories from people who have been affected by police violence.
Which violence can we tolerate and justify? I have not been writing enough about the ongoing investigation of January 6; to discuss justice, however, requires that we demand accountability.
Sign Democratic Association of Secretaries of State's petition to denounce members of Congress who defended the Big Lie even as extremists tried to invade the Senate and kidnap their colleagues!
Have a good weekend!
with love,
L