Category: Uncategorized

How Do I Talk to My Kids About Gun Violence?

street view of downtown Charlottesville Virginia

Early last week I got an automated message on my phone from my kids’ school that there was an active shooter within two miles and that the school was under a shelter-in-place order from the Charlottesville Police Department. I went through the arc of emotions: fear to worry to curiosity to a trust in my kids’ school and to a realization that some important conversations were coming. 

A few hours later the situation was “resolved,” the order lifted, and my kids – 7, 5, and 3 years old – made it home.

Tragically, the situation ended with the shooter being shot and killed by police.

Since the school wisely told the students very little about why recess was cut short and people had to run indoors, I prepared for the inevitable conversation with my kids about what went down.

Just the night before this shooting, Charlottesville’s new police chief held an open forum for the community to talk about the escalation in gun violence in our town, and many friends and colleagues spoke and cried and pleaded for solutions not rooted in violence.

The next day the police themselves were part of the escalation in gun violence. My oldest daughter asked me, “Dad, why did the police not talk to him? Why did they feel like they had to shoot him?”

I paused before answering, unsure how much to unload on her young mind. For our two older kids, my wife and I had already talked to them separately about the details of this incident. And this is less than three months after having to describe a man at UVA who boarded a bus and murdered three of our student athletes. 

I told her: “Well, think about what’s on an officer’s belt.” We named the items: mace, handcuffs, nightstick, and, of course, a gun. “Those are all tools of violence and control. It’s all an officer knows to do and use. Those people who can talk and support and offer the help this man needed weren’t called.”

Because she’s 7, I skipped over how I think that police negotiators, who were indeed on the scene, are still police and not equipped with the tools and categories communities have to interrupt violence non-violently.

Policing does not keep all of us safe. Police officers try and sometimes do. But policing does not. I’ve worked to teach my kids to respect and honor police officers as people while holding that we as a family do not believe in policing. 

Our kids see a noticeable disconnect with how we handle conflict in our home – which is to pursue acknowledgement of harm, acts of reconciliation, and change so the harm can’t happen again – and our society’s criminal legal system trinity of “public safety”: policing, prosecutions, and prison.

But we know there is another way. I’ve seen it in my community with our two local violence interrupter and conflict resolution groups: the B.U.C.K. Squad and Peace in the Streets. I’ve seen it with our city’s restorative justice program, Central Virginia Community Justice. I’ve seen it with organizations and groups and churches working to respond to harm with healing, to respond to drivers of violence like poverty, unemployment, and racism.  

I then said to my daughter, “I wonder what big emotions this man was feeling that led him to firing a gun and pointing it at police officers? I wonder what could have helped this man feel and manage his emotions.” I let this sit a bit, saving for another time a talk about ways a society can better acknowledge trauma and work to heal it rather than to cage it, either literally or figuratively. 

My hope is to create categories for my kids so that when violence happens we have some buckets established where we can dump emotions and questions that time and maturity will allow us to untangle with them.

Each family is different. There is no single right way to talk about this. I can’t imagine many people reading this who would be all in on how I did it. And I made sure to tell my kids this, that other families will say other things, that most families probably do not give as much detail to their kids as we do.

Here are some of my go-to guidelines to build a framework for safety that is not police-centered: 

  • Honor police as people while questioning policing
  • Advocate for everyone being given chance and space to heal and reconcile
  • Recognize that police and prisons exist to control and not to heal
  • Err on answering all questions. If a kid is old enough to ask, they’re old enough to have some measure of an answer.

A three-fold rule of thumb to start building these categories is to talk to your children about how you handle things when harm happens in your own home; talk about what you want to see in society; and talk about whether police are able to reconcile those two visions.

Lastly, the first conversation about police and prisons needs to be before a public act or personal experience of violence.

You know things are sticking and that kids are working out the details of these complex issues when, like my daughter, they ask during our church service if they can pray out loud “for the mayor to stop prisons.” That’s a start, and I’ll take it! I’ll take my imperfect delivery and her imperfect processing over America’s obsession with confinement and control.

My kids are white, middle-class babies, and the likelihood of them experiencing violence is lower than most. It is less likely they will “come home to yellow tape,” as a colleague of mine said. So I have to carefully put them in proximity to that violence by the conversations I have with them, hoping that our society can use its collective will to have a posture toward harm that is one of healing and not choosing to perpetuate cycles of violence.

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What I Know Today

street at night

They didn’t tackle me so much as deliver a hard body check. My phone — I was listening to a voicemail — fell to the ground but I kept my feet, off balance for a second before turning to face one of the guys mugging me.

We were under a street lamp on a normally busy Brooklyn block. The second guy stood behind me. He pressed his shoulder into my back, staying out of my view. I looked up the street toward the subway stop. People should have been coming home from work, but no one was within a few hundred yards. I was scared. I could feel my heart pounding.

The guy in front of me said, “Wallet.” I handed it over but asked him to take just the cash, that I would cancel the credit cards. He agreed but snatched my Metro card, and then my phone from the sidewalk before he and his partner walked away, calmly.

This was more than a decade before I joined EJUSA. I look back today and I’m staggered by how little I knew then about policing and prisons, about our national obsession with punishment, about violence and why it happens. 

I look back today and know that these guys didn’t rob me because they were bored, looking for fun. Did they need money to buy some pizza? Did they need, or just want, new sneakers? Had they tried to find a job with no luck? Had they been mugged themselves, leaving them with the trauma of that experience?

They were young and Black and living in a gentrifying neighborhood. New condos and iPhones surrounding them, but nothing coming their way. 

But what I knew back then — or what I believed — is the same thing so many of us, especially white people, have been taught: If something bad happens, you find the police. So I did. 

My understanding of violence and the criminal legal system has transformed over the past four years working with Equal Justice USA, having talked with many survivors and sitting with the Newark community in our Trauma to Trust program to understand how trauma manifests. I recently took another leap while reading No More Police: A Case for Abolition, by Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie. 

The book’s introduction, by two activists from Minneapolis’s Black Visions, includes this: “Criminalizing people does not solve the problems we face in our communities; it simply recategorizes and attempts to hide them.”

Two cops took a description of the kid I saw and what happened. They drove me around the neighborhood in case the guys were lingering. One cop said, “You know what you should’ve done? Clocked one of them. They never expect that.”

For a second, I felt like a coward, as if I owed something to these cops and failed, that I hadn’t seen the path to stopping this attack. But only for a second. I knew I didn’t want to hit anyone. I didn’t see meeting violence with violence as productive.

I didn’t know then that the cop’s prescription for violence is the cornerstone of our legal system. At its most extreme, we execute people who have killed. The executed are disproportionally Black people; victims are most often white. There are also countless other harmful responses to violence via policing, prosecutions, and prisons. And we have collectively come to accept those methods as so-called justice — even though they inflict so much additional harm. 

The book No More Police (you can read my colleague Jiva’s summary) put me back on that Brooklyn street with those two young men, who netted $80, a cheap flip phone, and a few rides on the subway. It put me in the 77th Precinct house, rifling through a thick binder filled with photos of young Black men, and then, in the weeks following, walking down that same block at night, looking over my shoulder, scanning the sidewalks to see how many people could see me. I traveled back to an evening, weeks later, when I found those cops outside my building, with a handful of new photos, one of which showed the guy I faced under that street lamp. 

I couldn’t believe it. After identifying him, I learned that he was 18 and had robbed someone else in my neighborhood. 

Eventually, I would testify before a grand jury that would indict the kid. Months later, I would get a call from the DA’s office. The lawyer wanted me to know that there would be no trial, that the young man who mugged me had pleaded guilty. “What’s going to happen to him?” I asked. 

“He’ll probably get two to three years.”

I didn’t know that that was possible. It took me a few seconds before I could speak. “For 80 bucks? That’s crazy.”

The lawyer asked me if I wanted to submit a statement to that effect for the sentencing. As ignorant as I was of our harmful legal system, I knew that a sentence like that was awful, that it was going to damage this guy, maybe for life. That there had to be a different way. 

Yes, I did want to say that two to three years was too much. 

What happened to him? I asked that question again and again as I read No More Police.  

I didn’t feel safer that night long ago, as I lay awake in bed after spending hours with the cops. I didn’t feel safer after the indictment or when I found out that a Black kid might spend nine days in prison for every dollar he took from me. 

Ripping him away from his family, his friends, his community, none of that addressed the possible reasons that he mugged me in the first place: that he probably didn’t have money, that he had unhealed trauma, that he wasn’t getting the education that he needed, that he didn’t have much in the way of prospects. 

His life could have looked entirely different if we lived in a country that addressed the root causes of violence and provided the healing and support that people who experience trauma, and who continue to carry historical trauma, need.

But we don’t.

Now I know.

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Blocking Black History Is Just The Beginning

Black History Month ended yesterday. It’s traditionally been a month where we celebrate the achievements of Black people, some iconic and some lesser known but still vital to U.S. history. 

Our history is deep, long, complex, and incredibly inspiring to me. It is also an important lens for our work, which is why the growing effort across this country to erase Black history is so distressing. These efforts seek to erase the truth about our nation’s failings on race and human rights. And without the precursor of an honest reckoning of this truth, we will never get to meaningful reconciliation.

I wrote about this problem for Essence: 

Erasing Black history is damaging because these lessons are crucial to understanding the problems we’re facing and thinking through solutions for real change. For hundreds of years, Black Americans have walked a tightrope with little room for error and few second chances because our systems have controlled and oppressed us—and still do. These systems span every aspect of our lives, from healthcare to education and economic opportunities to law enforcement.

I hope you can take a few minutes to read the rest of the piece. More than anything, I hope you will remember that Black history can’t and shouldn’t be contained to a month. And we must fight for our history to build the equitable and thriving communities that make up true public safety.

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Our Priorities Must Shift

Will Simpson at The Future of Public Safety Convening

During his 2023 State of the Union Address, President Biden could mention investment into community violence interventions or non-carceral responses only by pairing it with his stated support for continued investment into policing (this comes on the heels of the Safer Communities Act, where the White House funded 100,000 police in communities across the U.S.). 

What a moral conflict: to fund the lifesaving work happening in communities all across our country we must also continue to invest in policing which in 2022 was the deadliest year for police violence. Our nation’s priorities must shift. Specifically, we have to fund community-based solutions by shifting funds away from policing as we bring significant reforms to the institution.

In recent years, there has been a growing movement to shift the focus of public safety away from traditional policing models and towards community-based solutions. These strategies involve mobilizing community resources and networks to address the root causes of violence — such as poverty, unemployment, and lack of access to mental health services — rather than relying on law enforcement to respond to violent incidents after they occur. While these strategies have been shown to be effective in reducing violence in communities across the country, they cannot succeed without a significant shift in funding priorities. 

The police are an institution designed to enforce the law, often through the threat or use of force, which makes them poorly suited to addressing the root causes of violence. In fact, police often exacerbate the harm/violences of systems on marginalized communities. They are not trained to provide the kind of wraparound services that are necessary to address issues like poverty, mental health, and substance abuse, nor are they equipped to build the kinds of trusting relationships with community members that are necessary for effective violence prevention. We must also not overlook the fact that modern policing was founded during the era of slavery and that those seeds of racism and bias have for so long gone unaddressed and continue to sprout through to today. 

The data on the disproportionate use of force and deadly force on people of color by police only reinforces the need for a shift away from policing as we currently know it. In 2022, the deadliest year for police violence in our nation’s history, the racial disparities persisted. Twenty-five percent of those killed by law enforcement were Black despite Black people making up just 13% of our populations. 

A study by the National Academy of Sciences found that Black people are three times more likely to be killed by police than white people. Another study by the Center for Policing Equity found that, even after controlling for crime rates and other relevant factors, Black people are still more likely to be stopped, searched, and arrested by police than white people. These disparities are more than unjust; they also erode trust between communities of color and law enforcement, making it more difficult for police to effectively address harm in the community.

If we want to create truly safe and healthy communities, we need to invest in community-centered public safety ecosystems that prioritize the needs of community members over the interests of law enforcement agencies. This means investing in programs that address the root causes of violence: job training, mental health services, and affordable housing. It also means investing in programs that build trust between community members and law enforcement, like Trauma to Trust, a 16-hour experience that creates space for community residents such as survivors of violence, formerly incarcerated people, and community activists to have a guided conversation with local police officers. In short, it means investing in programs that recognize the interconnectedness of issues like poverty, mental health, and harm, and that seek to address these issues through a holistic, community-centered approach.

Of course, shifting resources away from law enforcement and towards community-based violence intervention strategies is easier said than done. There are powerful interests that benefit from the status quo, including police unions and private prison companies. There is also a pervasive cultural belief in the effectiveness of law enforcement, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. 

However, there are signs of progress. Some cities, like Newark, New Jersey, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana, have begun to invest in community-centered public safety models, with promising results. And we must recognize that this movement to fund communities over policing, while controversial, has brought much-needed attention to the need for a shift in funding priorities.

Ultimately, the choice between community-centered public safety ecosystems and traditional policing models comes down to a question of values. Do we value a system of justice that prioritizes punishment and force, or do we value a system of justice that prioritizes safety, healing, and accountability that repairs? The evidence is clear that the latter is more effective at reducing violence and building stronger, more resilient communities. It’s time to invest in that vision of the future.

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The Death of Tyre Nichols

black and white image of man at protest, wearing a mask over his mouth and holding his fist up

We remain shaken by the murder of Tyre Nichols, a 29-year-old Black man and father of a 4-year-old son, at the hands of Memphis police in a horrifying display of brutality.

The pain we all feel is the too familiar, relentless trauma that policing inflicts. We have been here so many times before.

After Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd and millions of Americans rose up in protest, I believed that we had reached a tipping point. I thought we would demand and get change to policing that would reduce violence and harm. Instead, we just left behind a year that set the record for police killings. Tyre Nichols will be one of the 1,000+ people that police kill this year. 

The five officers who killed Tyre are Black (a white officer has been fired but not indicted of the crime). But it doesn’t matter who wears the uniform or steps into the role. The role comes with the expectations and indoctrinations entrenched in the history of policing and its inextricable link to our legacy of slavery.

Enslavers established modern policing hundreds of years ago as a way to enforce slavery, to control and oppress Black people. Police went on to uphold segregation, enable lynchings, and crush civil rights protests.  

And police are just one branch of a sweeping system — prosecutors, judges, prisons — that has always enabled racial oppression through the continued dehumanization of Black people. 

Right now, all we can offer to the Nichols family is prosecution and punishment of the officers who took Mr. Nichols’ life. But our mission at EJUSA — that you make possible — is to build a path toward justice that doesn’t rely on punishment. This reimagined justice will prevent violence by delivering healing, safety, and accountability that repairs harm for all. 

My thoughts and prayers go out to Mr. Nichols’ family, his son, and the entire Memphis community. 

We will continue to transform safety and justice so that a system rooted in racial oppression is no longer the primary response to violence. We keep us safe. Investing in our communities is what keeps us safe.

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Dr. King wanted us to act

Statue at the Martin Luther King memorial in Washington DC, USA in October 2013. Photo by Jannis Werner

When I was in college, I served on a committee planning the University of Michigan’s renowned Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Symposium. 

That year, Michigan brought Dr. Cornel West, the philosopher, activist, and professor, to campus as the symposium’s keynote speaker. He was a hero of mine (and still is). As a planning committee member, I was honored to have lunch with him. His brilliance and outsized personality were guaranteed to leave an impression, but it was the simplicity of the message he delivered that day that has stayed with me the last 25 years. 

Dr. King was already an icon by the late 90s, almost supernatural for his leadership and intellect. His speeches and writings were universally revered. 

That drove Dr. West to remind us — I’m paraphrasing from memory — that King entered the world the same way we all enter this world. He was a human being, born of a woman. He was a son, a husband, and a father, who saw the same struggles that many communities see. He wasn’t so different from any of us. 

The difference was that he acted. He stepped forward, disregarding fear and danger, to battle the injustice and the brutalization incited by racist beliefs, laws, and systems.

Dr. West warned us that Dr. King would not want us to deify him or put him on a pedestal. Because doing so could in some ways excuse us from continuing the work that Dr. King was unable to finish.  

That important truth inspired me on that day. And today I’m inspired by our partners — all of them human beings who entered this world the same way as Dr. King. They too make the choice to take action in their communities. Lisa Good in Albany, Sateria Tate in Baton Rouge, and Lakeesha Eure in Newark are just a few who have answered the call to lead and serve. 

I hope that they inspire you too, because it is up to all of us to continue Dr. King’s work to hold America accountable to its declaration that all men are created equal.

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The EJUSA Difference

ejusa staff in black shirts

Happy new year! I hope you had a peaceful and joyous holiday season. 

Personally, I appreciated the break after a thrilling but fast-paced year. We accomplished so much together thanks to your support, but I want to share one specific highlight of 2022. 

When I started at EJUSA, I knew that one of my highest priorities would be to work with our team to plan for the next several years. There wasn’t ever any question about our vision for a world where violence is rare and where people are safe and have what they need to heal and thrive. But we are constantly assessing how we get there and what is required to have the most powerful impact. 

We’ve done that with our new strategic plan.

At the center is our fidelity to our values of equity, healing, partnership, and transcending divides. We prioritize the communities that need our work most. Black and Brown communities disproportionately experience the oppression and racism of our criminal legal system. They feel the hurt of violence. They also understand what is needed to create safety — more than just the absence of violence — in their neighborhoods. 

Our commitment to elevating the voice and power of these communities is paramount to our mission. I think it comes through in my favorite section in the report, titled “The EJUSA Difference.” If you have only a minute, I encourage you to read that section. I was proud that one of our partners said this: 

“There are few groups in the field — and fewer national groups — that are able to sit at national policy tables one day with big, well-resourced organizations, and the next day be with frontline groups.”

Building that kind of coalition is fundamental to solving the problem of violence, and our strategic plan makes the case for how we can get there. I hope you’ll check it out.

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Stopping the chain reaction of violence

group of people talking in a circle

Reimagining Justice This Month highlights stories about effective responses to violence — responses that disrupt cycles of violence, heal trauma, and address structural racism.

Targeting Retaliation: Stopping the chain reaction of gun violence in Paterson, northjersey.com

In the aftermath of violence, individuals and communities need safety and healing. The Paterson Healing Collective shows up for all of it, providing wrap-around services and breaking cycles of trauma. Watch this short documentary about survivors and community members relentlessly building justice reimagined to get a deep look into what it looks like to create safety for all.  

On the Other Side of Reparations, a New World Awaits, Yes Magazine

In order to move toward a future of our dreams, in which violence is rare and communities are safe and healthy, we must reckon with our country’s history of white supremacy. The movement for reparations is as old as American slavery, and the stories of the movement illuminate a vision of transformation rooted in repair. As we remember and honor the past and continue the work to make communities safer now, we can also both listen for the stories of repair and dream together the systems we need.

Voices from the Ground: The Stories of Three Violence Intervention Workers, Giffords.org

Community violence intervention (CVI) is an integral part of a community-centered safety ecosystem. We know that an effective public safety ecosystem requires a deep love of community, community-led coordination, open channels of communication between systems actors and community, and policy changes that are responsive to community needs. Each of the three stories highlighted in this piece show the importance of that deep, authentic community leadership and the need to resource programs that create access to safety for all.

Pushing back on false claims about crime, Prison Policy Initiative

After a month in which false messages about rising crime dominated election coverage, and dozens were killed on college campuses, parking lots, nightclubs, and neighborhoods, communities need real solutions to violence. Survivors of violence want healing and solutions that break cycles of trauma, not policing and incarceration. But their voices are so often used to advance harmful and racist misinformation. From the holiday dinner table to our social media feeds and beyond, each of us has a role to play in shifting narratives toward community, safety, and equity.

Plus: the Vera Institute’s recent report, The Social Cost of Policing, is full of vital information about the harm of the criminal legal system and the possibility of resourcing community-based solutions.

 

In Case You Missed It: Read and Share What’s On the EJUSA Blog 

  • Just What I Needed — Read and share Jami Hodge’s celebration and reflection on her first year at EJUSA. 
  • In Grief, She Took Action — Check out Mona Cadena’s heartfelt remembrance of friend and movement leader Bonnita Spikes, who recently passed away.

 

Opportunities 

  • In it Together — learn strategies and tools to transform conflict in this four-part training hosted by Interrupting Criminalization and Dragonfly Partners in February. Applications due on December 16.
  • Unwavering: The Power of Black Innovation – sign up for updates about an upcoming fellowship opportunity, and check out the trailer for this important documentary celebrating the optimism and perseverance of Black innovators, and email capacitybuilding@ejusa.org if you’re interested in a screening.
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Ecosystem in Action

street art on orange building

The night before Thanksgiving, legendary Newark street peacemaker Sharif Amenhotep found himself surrounded by legions of city police officers as they sought to confiscate his mini-bus from his vending area on Branford Place and Broad Street.

The incident got particularly dicey when officers appeared to be cutting or doing something to the underside of the vehicle, according to observers. Amenhotep, upset about what was happening, got under the vehicle to see what was being done to it. For reasons that need to be explained, the police decided to arrest Amenhotep, and they got violent in the process. Sharif suffered a broken foot — in two places — as the police put him in handcuffs.

In a different city, without a community-centered public safety ecosystem, things could’ve gone off the rails here. Instead, some of the critical features of an ecosystem surfaced: engagement of the full community; political leadership; bridge building between community and police; and more.

The community, outraged by what they were witnessing, challenged the police officers’ actions. Leadership from both the system and community stepped forward: Deputy Mayor Rahman Muhammad, a labor organizing veteran, and former Newark Anti-Violence Coalition member Tyrone “Street Counsel” Barnes pled with both the police and an angry public. Their poise helped avert an insurrection that could have led to numerous people getting hurt while harming the resurging image of the city immeasurably.

There are things about the incident still bothering me. To start, the mini-bus appeared to be legally parked according to local law. So what were the police doing? Second, Amenhotup is arguably one of the best-known anti-violence activists in Newark. Tragically, he’s the father of a murder victim: his daughter, Sanaa. But that has left him fully committed to peace. 

Further, how is it possible that NPD didn’t acknowledge the presence of Deputy Mayor Muhammad? If the community hadn’t done so, things could have become exponentially worse. 

What happened that night doesn’t align with a city and a department going through historic police reform. Nor does it work for a community that has embraced violence intervention, with powerful results — a 50% drop in murder. 

Haven’t these efforts garnered national attention as a number of cities are now examining how they can employ similar strategies to combat violence in their respective cities?

Violence intervention is a critical part of the community-centered public safety ecosystem. But the ecosystem is only effective when all the complicated parts of it are working together, and adjusting for changing conditions—and that especially includes the police! We saw that in the 2020 Uprisings, when the community and the police worked together to avert  violence at the old first precinct. This spirit showed again recently when two police officers were wounded by a man with a rifle in a mental health crisis. Violence interventionists not only assisted with critical crowd control efforts and follow-up services, they also helped move people from the building where the shots were coming from to safety in a nearby school and attended to their anxieties.

With a well-established, strengthening ecosystem in place, how does what happened to Amenhotep even take place?

It shouldn’t have!

At all!

So the real question for so many of us is: Which Newark Police Department is “real”? The one that went through the entire year of 2020 without firing a single shot? Or the one that offered little in the way of accountability when one of its undercover officers killed an unarmed Carl Dorsey on New Year’s Day 2021?

In the name of safety, integrity, accountability, and public trust, Newarkers really want to know: “Will the ‘real’ Newark Police Department please stand up?!?

If there is to be a protest condemning what happened, the organizations and leaders of the ecosystem should unite and demand that the police respect their work and presence in the community.

The nuances of the incident should be taken up in an investigation by the new Civilian Complaint Review Board. This incident and other incidents of inappropriate police behavior should also regularly inform our Trauma To Trust program. And, as always, the community must play a role in how this matter gets resolved. In Newark, the community truly aims to own their public safety.

Hands off Sharif Amenhotep! Drop the charges!

Stop Police Brutality! Peace in the Streets!

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Imagining the Possibility of Safety

book cover with illustrations of black women protesting

At the beginning of the summer, our executive director, Jamila Hodge, sat on a panel in a crowded gymnasium in Newark talking about transforming the justice system. 

“The system is going to do what it’s going to do,” she said. “It is a machine, and it was built for a purpose, and that was to oppress and control Black people.”

As a former prosecutor, Jami knows this truth intimately. The only woman on the stage, she shared elements of her struggle to do good within the system, her complicity in perpetuating harm, and ultimately her decision to join the movement for community-centered solutions to violence. That decision, she said, starts and ends with understanding “that those closest to the problem are closest to the solution, and must be closest to power.”

The movement is and has been led by survivors, most often Black women directly impacted by violence in communities and by the violence of policing and incarceration. Two survivors and movement leaders that we can turn toward right now are Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie, who recently published No More Police: A Case for Abolition, worth a read by anyone interested in the possibility of a world in which violence is rare.

No More Police was born out of decades of survivor-led community organizing and in the wake of uprisings and campaigns that arose from the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. Black women wanted more than the failed promise of justice from our criminal legal system. “We demand more,” write Kaba and Ritchie. “Our communities deserve more. We demand transformation.” 

Kaba and Ritchie begin the book with the movement history of the moment we’re in, lending their platform to Minneapolis-based organizers Miski Noor and Kandace Montgomery from Black Visions. Noor and Montgomery offer a front-row seat to the years of organizing for safety and healing in Minneapolis that created the conditions for organizations to mobilize and make sure that all of us know George Floyd’s name.

That movement history is important because it cuts through noise that #DefundThePolice was a spontaneous slogan that instantly went viral. It’s a history that Kaba and Ritchie expound, reaching back decades through flashpoints that have invited more and more people to question the idea that policing and public safety are synonymous. Ultimately, they challenge us with a more fundamental question: how do we make a world in which everyone has access to safety?

Safety is not just the absence of violence, it is the presence of well-being. Because of our years of work with communities in Newark, Baton Rouge, and across the country, we know that it takes an ecosystem of services, interventions, and institutions rooted in community, equity, and healing to create safety. While police are unquestionably connected to that ecosystem today, the questions we should ask now are 1) does the institution of policing increase or decrease safety, and 2) does policing need to be part of that ecosystem forever?

Kaba and Ritchie are clear that their answer to the first is that police contribute to violence more than they do to safety, and their answer to the second is no. The core argument in the book – that policing cannot be reformed, so it must be abolished – flows from an understanding that the criminal legal system is not broken, it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do. The violence of policing is not a flaw that can be fixed or a feature that can be minimized; violence defines both the root intention and the only set of tools available. 

They write, “This is about recognizing that policing is a virulent force that must be addressed head-on—and about so much more: healing justice, transformative justice, and transformation toward a better world.” Instead of focusing on reform, we should put our creativity, time, and resources toward the community-centered safety and healing initiatives that work.

Kaba and Ritchie meticulously lay out the case that cops don’t stop violence, and in fact that has never been the purpose of policing. Police, they remind us, “are violence workers: policing, at its core, is about securing compliance through force, threat of force, or deprivation.” If our goal is to create safety, we need to start with other tools altogether. Fortunately, survivors and community-led groups have been building those tools for generations. From community-based violence intervention and prevention to mental health services, housing, and healthcare – what we would call a community-centered ecosystem – these programs and tools are effective and should be resourced.

There’s no question that this book offers provocative ideas and questions. There will be some people who will read the title and turn away. Maybe that’s okay. But if you care about public safety, if you recognize that most violence impacts Black and other marginalized communities, and if you’re tired of seeing the criminal legal system sustain the same harms that it always has, then you should consider reading No More Police. 

It’s a roadmap not so much for implementing new programs, but for struggling together toward safety, healing, and equity. Each chapter is full of insights and questions, lessons and provocations, none of which are above critique. Ultimately, this book is an invitation to listen, to dream, to connect, and to experiment. Most of all, Kaba and Ritchie ask us to act, to start where we are, imagine the possibility of safety, and get to work together. The communities with whom we partner and our vision of a world in which violence is rare demand that we do just that.

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