Prisons and police. Before i introduce everyone i have a few housekeeping matters. First tonights program has americans finally which interpretation and live captioning. Just click your closed caption icon at the bottom of your screen on the righthand side. I want to thank everyone for taking questions towards the end. You can type them into the q and a box at the bottom of your screen. For those interested in reading, we have partnered with Community Bookstore located on Seventh Avenue and we will post a link to purchase the book through Community Bookstore in the chat. I want to thank humanity for your important role, support for the National Endowment to humanity and i want to encourage virtual conversations to the historical society. On wednesday a hosting jesse wegman, discussing his argument on abolishing the electoral college, next week i am excited to Host National guests talking about autocracy. Author of the new book about the reporting on hiroshima, who will be talking to the new yorker. To register, go to our website, brooklynhistory. Org. Now it is my pleasure to welcome the four participants into my program. Maya schenwar is editor in chief of truth out and coauthor of by any other name and author of locked down, locked out and coeditor of who do you serve, who do you protect, high, maya schenwar. Hi, great to be here. Victoria law is my coauthor on prison by any other name. She wrote resistance behind bars and coedited dont leave your friends behind, cofounder of nyc the book through bars and lives in new york, welcome. Thank you for having us. Ibid. Ejeris dixon is an organizer and strategist at the racial lgbt queue transformative justice antiviolence Economic Justice movement, founding director of vision, change when consulting, coeditor of bible stories and strategies of the transform of Justice Movement and contributors who do you serve, who do you pretext, violence and resistance in the united states. And finally, devante tate is a Community Advocate focusing on injustices that place black youth in cities and particular ending Police Brutality and mass incarceration and building education. In brooklyn, a cofounder of Grassroots Organization called africans helping africans which provide security and know your rights training. Welcome. Thank you all for being here and now i am going to turn this over to victoria law and maya schenwar. Thanks so much. Thank you everyone for joining us. We are here to talk about the push to Defund Police and how to create real safety and we are doing that in the context of the book we recently published, prison by any other name. The ideas devante tate shared, the critique of policing and insight for moving beyond it, we are here today. Vicki and i came to write this book because back in 201516 we were seeing a trend when it came to Prison Reform and police reform. This issue thanks to decades and decades of grassroots organizing, often, Prison Reform and sometimes police reform, liberals and conservatives say they can find Common Ground particularly because it costs a lot of money, cost savings. But much of what politicians have been proposing in the realm of prison and policing are reforms that will not change the system. Because they are in white supremacy, rooted in capitalism, rooted in history, rooted in oppression. Our book is about the ways many reforms, look like prison. Police alternatives look a lot like police. We look at the dangerous ramifications of prison alternatives, monitoring, lockdown, Drug Treatment Centers and psychiatric institutions that tend to mirror the punitive processes in prison and in doing so these alternatives are expanding surveillance and policing and harming larger and larger groups of people particularly black indigenous people. Trans people and drug users. For many of the reforms, they may be changing from surface level dynamics, adding more training, diversity, communities which we will talk about more later, we know many of these reforms expand Police Budget instead of increasing them. To extend the reach of Police Department into communities, increasing potential for violence. Also in our book, we explore some of the ways we actually cultivate the communities and wellness without that so this is a key piece of Defunding Police and defunding prison. These projects are not only about that, but building different worlds, cultivating wellbeing. Lets get the conversation going, you want to start us off . We have seen immense momentum to defund the Police Across the country and we have also seen push back, in new york, doing an event based in new york, the push back comes from politicians and conservative media, we saw this during the push to defund 1 billion from the nypd budget in new york where people beat their chests, something their communities particularly with city councilmember in Crown Heights who accused people of wanting to defund the police of being gentrified years about community safety. Weve seen an uptick in media reports spotlighting Violent Crimes and tying it to the movement to defund the Police Rather than looking at root causes and what causes harm and violence. Can you talk about your experiences with policing in brooklyn in particular and why you dont see it as a viable solution to violence . Guest just to get to the questions, i was born and raised in bruckman and i am a resident and the nypd, it is not been good to some that up. Maybe 11 or 12 years old i have been harassed by the nypd from having guns drawn on me to being harassed for nothing, and a lot of things in detail about but pretty much it my entire life i always felt something was wrong with me. That is what we do and they are doing something wrong. When i became an adult i realized it is really unjust. I have been around twice. For any of those arrests. I dont see it as a solution, asked time moves on the nypd gets a new budget, crime continues to go down. We have to ask ourselves why and then more cops is going to bring crime down but crime is going to dip inside the community that is coming and getting involved in different movements and we are starting to see as a community there is so much more we can do. To touch on defund the police i dont want to talk too much but i know you brought up how they have been trying to defund the Police Movement of the rise in the crime and those things but the thing i have never seen from news reports is coronavirus and we always have to keep in mind crime hasnt happened because of circumstance and covid19 put a lot of people in low income areas out of work, in these lowincome areas, so much an increase in crime, when they shut down, the backboards and parks, you see a rise in crime in low income areas because people have nothing to do so they turned back, with the environment tells them to do. I bring that up when people bring up how crime has risen during the pandemic. Can you talk about your experience of policing in brooklyn as a viable solution to violence. I just want to agree with the process. I moved to brooklyn in the early 2000s and gotten here, Police Violence, Sexual Violence and i am an antiviolence specialist. Policing is violence from the experiences that i have had, folks in our neighborhood, of options, black communities have been policed as a way to ensure gentrified years not as a way for black people to stay in homes for black people in our communities. Policing doesnt create safety but connecting, people need help and support, economic support, support for their emotional needs or mental health, they need support around drug use, theres a list of ways we can address what people need to reduce violence but often all of us who work on violence, when somebody does end up calling the police they are also planning for the fact they may be arrested, they may be beaten, they may be attacked and not get the help they deserve. Policing is designed to create violence against communities of color particularly lowincome communities of color and particularly black communities and people of color communities so as a black woman in brooklyn we have known we needed to create our own safety despite a long time, to address violence. Thank you so much, both of you. The response to Police Violence in terms of mainstream politics usually is not the recognition, as both of you. That out. Often it comes by way of reform and politicians propose new ways of policing and Community Policing or decision policing, gang policing but these labels are often versions of the same thing so there is a socalled Community Policing, neighborhood policing, this, by the logic of putting more policing communities could now communities, in a soccer tournament, try to hold community picnics, make it seem as though they are part of a community which he races the fact that we always have the power to legally use violence at any moment. Community policing, neighborhood policing involve calling community leanings in which particularly white residents, likely to be sympathetic to belief, the eyes and ears of the police. Essentially neighbors. This is expanding Police Departments by turning Community Members into extension of the police. Another newer type of policing we talk about a lot that often gets lifted off of reform is datadriven or predictive policing and this is supposed to predict where crime will happen or who will perpetrate it and then to those areas. Politicians and police like to say using data reproduces racial bias and this is something you will hear a lot if you attend community leanings that can be circled, lift up this idea of data and the idea is numbers cant be recessed or biased but actually crime data is racist. Crime data is inherently biased because it is based on who is arrested in the past and who police are likely to target in the past and this relates closely to gang policing, another practice put forward, police use all kinds of self he tactics to identify people they label as possible gang members and tracking and focusing on these people and sometimes arresting them so basically this is labeling people as future threats. If someone has been classified a gang member by police they are more likely to be harassed and that happens sometimes. When nikki interviewed you you talked about gaining policing. Talk about your experiences with this and also talk broadly about the impact of gang policing on communities. I was in middle school going to late a school i was gang affiliated, but in Eastern Europe as i later learned years later going across city, the way they would Police People in gangs would be so different, the way it was was so different. Around the town they thought of doing big gang environments, there were some before then but i wasnt aware. Before the gang the i was in they would drive around, you could be on a Basketball Court talking to someone, then they would jump out, oftentimes the same detectives as well. Always the same one that would come and harass you. They knew your name and your arrest history if you had one, your affiliation, they knew where you lived and sometimes they also do this to people who are not in gangs but just had family in gangs, just to give an example, they would drive around, jump out of the cars and ask people for their ids and right names down like on a notepad, they would write peoples names down and kept doing this for months. Why are they writing peoples names down . And a lot of other peoples names, a lot and i always wondered why do they keep writing peoples names down and i later found out after the gang indictment, heavily impacted because they were indicted with them i was in philadelphia at the time but i later realized, using those notepads to tie into some see who was consistently harassed. This person in this area around this group of people at this certain time etc. And try to use that for manipulation. You could have someone in the gang, they would literally use that to try to tie someone to a gang in the second thing they have this gang database. Im not sure i know what that is, theres no way to know, and regular Community Members out right now and whether you are indicted, they use this database for a number of things. And find out this person has the type of gang relation. And before bail reforms and everything, this type of gang affiliation, that has gotten so many people just because a affiliation, this is how they work to keep people in gangs down and just to clarify just that doesnt mean they are involved, somebody could have grown up in a gang or been around someone in a gang and that is what people see. When people come to gang solutions it is the wrong practice and has been called out recently and honestly we need to fight to get the down the gang database. Thank you, devante tate. The next question is for you. We talk about Community Created alternatives that are separate from the police and may look different in different places. In brooklyn you developed a safe Neighborhoods Campaign. Talk about the history of that and what safety outside the police looks like. Reporter the project, almost want to ground what i worked on as part of a long legacy so communities of color creating alternative Safety Systems to the states through generations so i was looking for the person that was because the violence of policing and the heart of policing out of the period of time, particularly queer trans black people who were getting attacked on the streets and somebody showed up at the office who was attacked on the street, tried to call the police for help, got arrested and got attacked so the idea, what we would say to the community, to protect us and so the safe Neighborhoods Campaign was the idea of what does it mean person by person, business by organization block by block to build up a system of people who wants to build violence outside policing and how do we do that . At that time a bunch of other organizations start work on policing and security practices for our options and events for the administration and how do we apply this to what happened on the street . And the safety tips, everybody writing down on pieces of paper, ways that they supported their friends and family members with Safety Strategies talking to elders, family members, some who lived in new york and some who lived in other countries and a series of organizations, getting them to agree to prevent all forms of violence within their spaces and getting them to agree if somebody was running from the violence, started to facilitate training, dealing and escalating violence and often in our training asking people how to navigate in your state and things we only learned from whether or not most organizations dont have a written safety plan but have a strategy and in some ways you are supporting them to clarify their strategies. I left after five years at our biggest goal was to build up enough organization as people to create a neighborhood where we could figure out what accountability looks like when talking about strangerbased violence and the ties between people. We had exactly what we needed to intervene in incidents of violence and navigating forms of violence that are already state involved, or that they were pretty severe. Sometimes we were just briefing money for them. The idea, we started to think about and connect organizing the relationships we need recognizing the relationships and people on your block are more likely, and anybody else and they get their first and what is it that needs to go up and what do we need . That was the campaign, deeply impacted many times, businesses, the most vulnerable. Which we know so many ways but also important for us to see it in that strategy and i am so excited to work on something that now i support organizations around the country and thinking about and when we have the time and momentum, to think about what would it mean to have that. Thanks. I want to open a question for the group and any comparisons for your current work also that would be awesome. What are some ways we can create without police, if you want to start, victoria law, devante tate, anything you could add. Sure. Has a jurist, to get to know your community, they are the ones most likely to respond and to get their first. If something is going on with my neighbors upstairs i call 9 one one or they call 9 one one or someone called 9 one one the police come if they come when they come as opposed to me throwing on shoes and a mask, knocking on the door and saying is everything okay, it might be like my partner fell and i cant get them up and cant get this person to the hospital for a domestic dispute and intervention but everyone one floor down will be a lot bigger. Getting to know your neighbors isnt just about violence but also a way in which you can lean on each other for help. Covid19 has decimated so many communities so what does it mean if you dont know your neighbors and you are isolated and dont have people who can go to the store for you if you are at risk, what does it mean if you dont have child care or know your neighbors and you dont know the neighbor 3 years above, sitting at home on unemployment if you are retired or something else, more than happy to hang out with your kids so you work at a job that did not give you the option to work at home or take unemployment. Getting to know your neighbors, the bay area transformative collective has a practice called pod mapping, in which people think about the relationship they have and the relationships you have with people and who can you call on in certain instances, who might you call on if you need healthcare or if you need to borrow 20 to get groceries in your next paycheck or the person, ne