Spiritual director of the East Bay Church of religious science right here on 41st and telegraph. Come see us sometime. And this evening i am so grateful to be talking about this wonderful book it is packed full. We keep us safe, building secure, just and inclusive immunities by zach norris. I want to tell you little bit about him. You probably know a lot about him already. He is the executive director of the Ella Baker Center for human rights and the cofounder of restore oakland. Its a Community Advocacy and Training Center to empower Bay Area Community member is to transform local economic and justice issues. He is also the cofounder of the justice for family, thats a National Alliance family driven organization working to end our youth in conservation epidemic. Hes helped to build California First statewide network for families of incarcerated youth which led the effort to close five youth prisons in the state and pass legislation to pass legislation to enable families to stay in contact with their loved ones. Which also defeated proposition six a destructive and ineffective criminal justice ballot measure. Hes a harvard graduate and nyu educated attorney. Hes also a graduate of the Labor CommunityStrategy CenterNational School for strategic organizing in Los Angeles California and he was 2011 Soros Justice follow. He is a former board member and witness for peace and just cause oakland and currently serving on the justice for families board. He was a recipient of the american constitution societys david carlin liner publicinterest award in 2015 and a member of the 2016 class of the Levi Strauss Foundation of pioneers of justice. Pioneers of justice award. Hes married to author and labor organizer sau rew and they have two daughters and they are raising them here in oakland. Hes got quite an impressive resume lets give him some love. I believe it zach wants to share something from his book. Hes gonna give us a short reading from his book. Right on. How is already feeling . Good, i appreciate seeing all of your beautiful faces. Being in this institution the library, which is my favorite public institution. Just appreciate yall being here and when i told my mom, she knew i wrote the book but that i was in a go on a book tour she said you have to read from the book. So i gotta follow my moms orders and read a little bit from the book. Its just about one page just to manage expectations. How are yall feeling . Good. 1823 month unknown. Slaveholders from the deep south were more desperate for slaves since the abolition of the atlantic slave trade in 1808. And since the cotton gin invented in 1794 had allowed the production of cotton to really take off the prices of enslaved African People have risen in this period one in every 10 enslaved person was relocated from the states upper south to the lower south. They were sold down the river. And with no means of staying connected to the families and communities they had known. Slightly over half experienced family separations meaning children were separated from their parents or spouses separated from each other. The little boy was just at the cusp of his years of highest output the ages from 8 to 15 years according to popular wisdom among slaveholders. Children in these sought after ages were often bought alone on the auction blocks enslaved people were lined up by height. Making it even more likely children would be separated from their parents. The buyers examine the little boy as if he were livestock. In the end he was sold to another slave master in mississippi. When the ship lost into the water his mother was left standing in the world crying she never saw him again. These are unrelated yet connected stories to scapegoat an entire group of people making them a source of all evil is to disregard their humanity. As the United States grew from 13 colonies to 50 states this scapegoating made it easier to continue justifying the taking the land and lives of Indigenous People in the lives and labor of black people. It is a long tragic line a trail of tears and legacy of trauma from stories like my families to the immigrant families being demonized today in the name of Public Safety. To protect our job our wealth, to protect our way of life to keep our homes and families safe. America has been engineering and expanding a model of systematic scapegoating for the past 200 years. I wanted to offer that just to kind of situate the conversation. I think often times when we talk about Public Safety we can drop that kind of policy level and not really examine what some of the roots of our Safety Systems are in this country. Thats what i wanted to read a i was right there with that little boy being examined. I was right there with them examining his teeth and making sure he didnt have a lamp. And particularly with his mother walking the wharf even though she couldnt walk with him, how did you hear about the details of that. Through passage of letters and to my aunts who i interviewed a series of keepsakes from our family not everybody has those stories. I know i dont i wish i did. How do you think that knowledge and information made you want to become a lawyer . Truth be told when i applied to law school i didnt know what i was doing with my life. I applied to law school at the end of undergrad and i was at harvard that was the next thing you did. I was not trying to rock the boat. My hair i had a high top fade my hair was taller than i was. Eighth grade graduation like the mortar board barely fit over my head. They were calling all the awards for Different Things the award for math, science and i got all the awards it was like oscar so white. Eighth grade graduation, right. The truth of the matter that reflected injustice as well. Among my predominantly black catholic school, i was the lightest if not among the lightest if not the lightest of africanamerican kid in that classroom. That was lost on me those disparities is an eighth grader but by the time i got to harvard and saw how differently young people were treated for doing the same things a friend of mine got into a pretty serious fight at the school gymnasium, folks using and abusing drugs and harvard and getting a semester off they were getting the time of the support they needed they were Getting Mental Health counseling, meanwhile, family and friends were being locked up for doing similar things. Thats kind of what led me to a journey toward social justice. It wasnt until i got to the Ella Baker Center i thought about and grappled with what is it take to advance social justice. That was the first time i decided to step off the beaten path just like academic achievement i heard about this organization urbanization called Ella Baker Center and that resonated my mom was teaching in Public Schools and had a lack of resources in her classroom it has five times as many people as Allegheny County does. In our very best basic messaging when i was a Law School Student intern at the Ella Baker Center we said that jails be too big and too far and too racist. We were engaged in a campaign to get them to stop this construction was really bad. The good the thing about good poetry is there still abbad poetry there still good protest. Allegheny county of supervisors said we are going to whos willing to stop the slaughter stop moving from moving forward. Im the people pleaser. Im sitting on my hands with my hands under my butt cheeks like i know my hands are not about to go up for this. [laughter] but i started to see other peoples hands go up maybe it was the people pleaser in me or maybe trying to impress my fellow intern but my hand was going on up unbeknownst to me. And not as high abthat was like a huge Pivotal Moment for me. Because im in law school, im learning about the law, im supposed to be like learning about what civil rights are and how we change our society and nothing i was learning in law school was actually teaching me that. Being taken to santa rita and seeing the normalcy of africanamerican incarceration being prorated along this courtyard with nothing but a black man. I didnt know that story at that time. But i think having seen a couple episodes of eyes on the prize we were going to sit in and protest and then they were going to change their minds. [laughter] and see the light but thats not what happened. And we were able to stop this super gel from youth from moving forward. [applause] i say all that to say like to me i didnt start with like this clear intention of like i want to change things, i really was kind of a people pleaser more than anything but i think thats what leads me to believe we can all build power because through that experience i had an opportunity to understand what it means to really engage with the community and build power and move from being a people pleaser to trying to build people of power. It sounds like when you were in college you started recognizing the difference in safety of being a certain skin color as opposed to some of the darker skin color we are looking for ways to feel safe and more and more as we have more conversations we are finding out a lot of people are not feeling safe. When you were what about safety was driving you the whole time. One curious thing is that crime by and large is actually at historic lows. Crime has been decreasing in terms of overall Violent Crimes even property crime has been going down from past decades. Our anxiety has actually been going up. That was part of one of the things i was looking at in exploring this book is like out of those two things mesh . What i found is that there is no lie about safety. This traces all the way back to that story. I call it the he keeps a safe lie is the lie of White Supremacy is the lie of male supremacy is the lie of genderbased violence is the lie of abusers because abusers say, dont trust those who are closest to you. Dont trust your girlfriend, dont trust your neighbor and take to the National Level dont trust your neighbor around the block, dont trust your neighbor on the border, dont trust your neighbor in distant lands even those those folks want the same as we do. That kind of abuse of life is the lie the criminal Justice System has really run on and operated. Zach sure we will take more money from the State Government and the federal government and expand the juvenile because everybody else is doing it right. And so, the criminal Justice System and really run on this live in ways that actually have real harm. The harm that happened behin bed closed office doors, and be peoples homes and those are somewhat personal but also institutionalized. You couldnt get away with those if it werent for institutions and people protecting them at the same time pretty in their other forms of institutional harms and i will the throughout this thought. The Climate Change, and just inequality and people not having homes, and the police are often sent out to remove those mothers from the home in west oakland when they are trying to find a home for their children. In place officers often breakup not to be half of the owners but actually on the behalf of others but instead of supporting workers having affair wave. So it like in this way, the criminal Justice System has like, hide some of the harms that are all around us. And focus on the very narrow definition of crimes that actually reinforces the status quo and that helps to easily mike crime can actually be going down in terms of statistics of but our anxiety is going up because the person in the white house has different people that lies it so many different ways. Meanwhile, is like trust us right, we got this all coronavirus taken care of right. Trust me. Meanwhile the them cut the funding for the center for disease control. So theyre cutting the funding for a lot of the basic things that actually keep us safe. And are hiding a lot of the harms around us pretty one of the fundamental truths of them want to get to this solution and not just follow focus on the problems. Is that we keep us safe. If we recognize, Public Safety has the term public and it right. So when we take care of the public, we actually take care of Public Safety. We have kind of lost that in the equation. We should be thinking about really taking care of one another as a strategy towards achieving things. Host there are a lot of ways to take care of things you pretty much takes laura a lot of different ways we hurt each other from the children that are intellectually disabled to lgbt tail just the whole transit gender thing to what happens in families in the 700,000 children who are harmed by their own Family Members and people by people who are close to them. There are so many levels of violations that you talk about in the first part of the book that is very troubling but at the same time, bringing this to the forefront must be part of your attention so that you can work with us. He say more about that. Zach one of the reasons is the pressings that are going to the satirist this is not the work of one person. I had a lotta support from the levi straus foundation. And setting aside time to work with them in an editorial consultant and bring this book into being. So that is one reason that i wanted to bring this back into the organization quote from whitemore problematic level, this represents the wisdom of a lot of people. So in 2015 we did a report who pays the true cost of incarceration on families which was a National Community driven Research Project along with 20 other communitybased organizations across the country and this research. And i got a lot of press which is great. But the press really focused on the problem they didnt really focus on the solution that families wanted. So the book is an effort to lift out those solutions and restore oakland that we started in an effort to put forward a concrete and tangible vision of what Community Safety looks like. The book really reflects the wisdom of that Community Driven research but also this annual event that we do called night out for safety and liberation. Has anybody heard of that National Night out . And National Night out is a great event in the attention but the message it sometimes is very narrow. So the intention behind it to say that we create safety as community tenni because often ts but enforcement comes out and since you are the eyes and ears of the police. So if you see something, say something. Respectfully i would offer that we have more than just eyes and ears. We have heart, we have hands, we have minds that there are a lot of ways that people contribute to Public Safety and what we are trying to do is night out for safety is talk about how we knew mentor a young person, you are helping them and if youre providing a job to a castrated person or helping advanced safety safety. Each year we have done that, the revenue communities and folks in new mexico, restaurant workers in new york, restaurant workers in rhode island said that if i cannot feed my own family even though i am putting food on your table, im not safe. And so all of these stories and all of these different communities and experiences, every year since the murder of martin says ive been looking to folks and try to represent those stories inside of this book. So thats what, i mean, by this is really of an effort of togetherness. Rev. Celeste frazier in your book you call it the criminal legal system pretty tell us why you dont call it the criminal Justice System. Zach most fundamentally and has not produced justice. His Justice System that is predicated on separation. And if you close your eyes and ask folks in this room today before or even just keep them open if you dont feel comfortable and thought of as a time he felt safe. Just asking for some audience participation. I will ask you to think of a time. So come back to the room. Ive asked this question a lot of times and specifically, his people and coming in some kind of relationship. Maybe being held by a Family Member or being in a Faith Institution we feel surrounded by your community. Safely is really directly tied to relationships. And as you know as a pastor of a living community, that is critical to our notions of feeling safe, we do in terms of Public Safety, the criminal court system is really to move people. We are moving them from relationship but also removing them from their chance to actually be held accountable. Because the answers to someone, you have to be in a relationship with somebody. If you been removed from that situation, altogether then is very difficult then produce accountability. So have this notion of being tough on crime and removing them and putting the very far away. I think what is really difficult is facing the harm that you have caused. In a real way and having to make amends for that. Over time. Consistently. That does not look the same in every situation. In one of the things in a talk in the book is like, how we are sort of justice has been narrowly focused and i dont want to have the narrow focus but it