Our Anti-Racist Vision for Police Accountability

To transform our justice system, we must change the way we think about accountability. Our culture of punishment as accountability has never made us safer. But there are models of accountability that heal rather than harm.

EJUSA has a vision for how this kind of accountability can apply to policing for the damage and pain it has caused in Black and Brown communities. Read my latest op-ed to learn more, and please share it with your friends and family. Here’s a sample:

Police enforced slavery, enabled lynchings by white mobs, enforced Black Codes, and continue to criminalize Black and Brown kids in our schools for the same behavior that gets white kids a mere warning. In short, policing as a system has always upheld white supremacy, no matter how many individual officers act in good faith.

By now, it is clear that our justice system, including policing, must transform. Transformation cannot happen without accountability—for the present and the ugly past. But what does that look like in practice?

…An anti-racist vision of accountability repairs harm instead of causing more of it. This process, modeled on restorative justice, begins with the essential step of acknowledging and taking responsibility for the harm. From there, accountability continues with additional steps to make things right and prevent future harm.

Please read the entire op-ed and share it on social media. We can’t end mass incarceration or heal our brutal legacy of racism and police brutality unless we redefine accountability…for everyone.

Thank you for getting the message out there.

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By Shari Silberstein

Since 2000, Shari Silberstein has dedicated her career to transforming the justice system from one that harms to one that heals. Under her leadership, and using campaign strategies she helped develop, Equal Justice USA has helped end the death penalty in nine states, built first-of-its-kind conservative and evangelical coalitions for justice reform, secured millions in state funding for healing services to families of murder victims, launched an innovative model for training and dialogue between police and communities on trauma and race equity, and strengthened dozens of local organizations across the nation working for justice, violence reduction, and healing. Shari has been a national voice in helping to break down the silos between criminal justice reformers and crime survivor advocates. Her expertise has been a source in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, and Harper’s Magazine, and she has written op-eds for an array of media outlets, including Fox News, the Marshall Project, and U.S. News and World Report. Shari has a bachelor's degree in film from New York University and a master's degree in Middle Eastern studies from the University of Texas at Austin.