Summary of “Abolition on the Ground: Reporting from the Movement to #DefundthePolice”
On March 1, 2022, the Barnard Center for Research on Women (BCRW) hosted a conversation with Dean Spade, Angélica Cházaro, Erica Perry, and Andrea Ritchie. Co-sponsored by Seattle University’s Patricia Wismer Professorship in Gender and Diversity, the speakers shared lessons learned since June 2020, how their work fits into the larger abolitionist vision for a world without cages or borders, and the key strategic questions facing the movement right now.
This conversation references and builds upon well-researched information contained within a number of publications by Interrupting Criminalization, including Cops Don’t Stop Violence, and the DefundPolice Update. I highly recommend both of them for further reading.
View the full recording, speaker profiles, and other details on BCRW’s website: https://bcrw.barnard.edu/event/abolition-on-the-ground-reporting-from-the-movement-to-defundthepolice/. You can also watch the recording on YouTube: Abolition on the Ground: Reporting from the Movement to #DefundthePolice
What follows is a selection of quotations from the recording.
Dean Spade
7:40: The powers that be are relentlessly working to right their ship in the face of [the 2020 uprisings] and to re-legitimize policing and criminalization with surface reforms. … To me, it feels essential to observe how significant the impact of the 2020 uprising has been. It changed the political weather in a way that only disruptive action by huge numbers of people fighting cops in the streets can do. And it feels essential that we celebrate our victories: the prison expansion projects we’ve forced them to cancel, the prisoners our movements have forced them to release, the dollars that have been carved out of police departments and reallocated to human needs.
8:44: But we also have to track the betrayals and cooptations with care. We have to study every counter-move that our opposition makes and share every lesson learned across the states, countries, cities, counties — circulating abolitionist wisdom and backing up each other’s campaigns.
Erica Perry
16:17: We gave birth to the Black National Assembly. We was like, we’re going to specifically organize Black people in Nashville, in the middle Tennessee area — even folks who have been displaced from Nashville — around abolition. And as a part of that we were like, “Hey y’all, what are the issues impacting Black people and how can we organize around a people’s budget to do that and take money from cops, courts and cages? What do we want?” And so folks were saying: education, housing, and public safety. And while the demand that we have consistently had has been divest and defund, we also knew that we had to really go deep in what it meant and what it means to have community-driven public safety.
17:02: We’re having hard conversations. We’re talking to people who are both like yes, … we ain’t fucking with the police. I’m seeing my family and church members in the streets who are really clear about what they want, and I’m also hearing community members who are also like, “Yo but somebody just held a gun to my head while I was locking up the store the other day!” We’re holding all of these and we’re saying, no but the police isn’t the answer and it hasn’t saved us — it’s not gonna save us. But also y’all understand the role of the FOP. It’s not just the FOP we’re up against, but we also saw the district attorney’s office organizing [against us].
21:17: We really struggled around — when I’m just thinking about the defund — removing school resource officers from schools and taking away surveillance. And folks were like, No! that’s safe — they thought of that as a safety net. So we were like, “Yo if that didn’t exist, what would we create?” And people came back again with community — ways for community members to work with students who are maybe having challenging behavior to help them work through that process.
Angélica Cházaro
27:57: Seattle was the only city to defund the police two years in a row. We saw SPD’s budget go from $409 million before the uprising in 2020, to $363 million in 2021, and then now $355 million in 2022. Our city has gone from funding 1422 cops in 2020 to funding 1225 cops this year. We’ve also eliminated position authority for 140 cops — so there’s 140 jobs that the police can’t ask for funding for anymore. We civilianized 9–1–1 dispatch and we also moved parking enforcement and domestic violence advocates out of the police department. We moved 30 million out of SPD and towards a participatory budgeting process, which is a process where regular people get to make decisions about how to spend the city budget. We also got three million for a Black-led research process to inform the participatory budgeting process. We also pressured the city to fund 40 new organizations to develop non-police ways of responding to harm and violence: everything from skills classes to violence interruption classes have been receiving city money for the past two years.
30:20: We made really bold demands. Our initial demands were to defund the police by 50%, to invest in Black and brown communities and to release all protesters without exception. That willingness to make the demands — although we didn’t know what the end point would be — and to hold fast to that number I think served us right. I think it also served us that the city wasn’t new to these kinds of bold demands.
32:17: We all know the places where the violence of police cuts most deeply are also the places in our city that suffer from the biggest under-investment, right? So the neighborhoods with no sidewalks — where kids literally get hit by cars walking home from school on the road — are also the neighborhoods here where the police spends the most money. So we formed a coalition called Solidarity Budget in …2020. This was environmental justice, housing justice, transportation justice, Indigenous sovereignty, labor… The city was trying to pit us against each other and we said, “No, no deal. We actually are all on the same side.” We know that we need to push for more progressive taxation, and also that much of our city’s funding has been tied up in policing, in courts, in cages for so long. And so we all win — like, we all get more sidewalks if we defund the police and the courts.
33:27: We took Mariam Kaba’s advice that “everything worthwhile is done with other people,” and really discovered that everything worthwhile is done with other movements.
38:16: We had an election where we saw a republican city attorney be elected for the first time in many many years in Seattle, and we also saw a person running for mayor who was elected with promises to not defund the police anymore. And what these folks are doing together is saying we’re not going to cut SPD anymore — we’re going to start throwing more money at them, and we’re going to push for what is essentially broken windows policing. … People are being arrested at Target for stealing literally baby formula and vitamins, and they’re calling this organized retail theft.
Andrea Ritchie
43:24: The defund movement is absolutely not dead. It’s far from it — no matter what any politicians or pundits or police might say about it. And in fact, if anything it’s gotten more coordinated, more skilled, more sophisticated, more deeply embedded in communities, and really just more determined to wrest power from police and resources from the state to make sure that our communities — our people — survive and experience safety (in the ways that Angélica describes) that we’ve actually never had because of police.
48:10: We’re fighting a police state. … The ferocity of their response to the defund demand is an indication of how powerful that demand was and is and remains.
49:06: An increasing number of people are … understanding the lie that is police reform. When you declare that there’s a ban on no knock warrants and then Amir Locke is dead by a no knock warrant. … Not one prosecution that’s happened in the last two years has stopped the next killing and the next killing and the next killing and the next rape and the next beating and the next tasing and the next incarceration.
50:02: Cops know that fear is their most reliable weapon and so they’ve reached for it with a vengeance, and they’ve come out with, you know, this “wave.” And as Ida B. Wells said, she described the media as an accessory to lynch mobs, and the media continues to be an accessory to the police and to their death making ways.
50:35: Police have come back with this notion of a massive crime wave and massive wave of violence hitting the country that is supposedly caused by divestments from policing. We’ve debunked that data — there’s a publication called Cops Don’t Stop Violence that Interrupting Criminalization put out, and many many people are debunking the data and highlighting the biased reporting that’s producing it, highlighting the fact that cops are the ones who produce the data about crime.
51:50: The violence that’s happening now is happening on the cops’ watch. We’re not ignoring the fact that there is violence in our communities because we are experiencing it. We know that best. But it’s happening under the current system and it’s precisely why we’re calling for an end to the current system. We’re pointing out that movements to defund police are survivor-led movements — they’re movements led by people who are experiencing the violence who are saying, I’m tired of money being poured more and more and more into something that’s not actually stopping the violence that I’m experiencing, and it’s actually increasing the violence that I’m experiencing.
53:12: In this new phase of struggle, we’re not shrinking, we’re expanding. More and more people are doing what Erica and Angélica are talking about, saying we want to defund cops and courts and cages — we want to take the whole thing down — and borders and the military. We’re looking at the whole picture and building our connections and understanding that housing is abolition, and abolition is housing; child care is abolition, and abolition is child care; ending climate crisis and injustice is abolition, and abolition requires ending the climate crisis. We’re making those connections and we’re not allowing ourselves to be divided in the ways that we have been before.
54:47: We really need a clearer vision of the world we’re trying to build. We really need a better understanding of what kinds of systems of governance and what kinds of ways of relating to each other and to the planet we are trying to build. And that requires us to engage in study … and to really grapple with tough questions around the role of the state, around what community control means and doesn’t mean.
55:25: We have to grapple with ideas of safety — Mariam [Kaba] talks a lot about safety not being a thing that you can be sold by the police or by a corporation or by the state. It’s a relation and it’s about building and understanding those relations.
57:17: We have to divest not just financially but emotionally and ideologically from policing and punishment as connected in any way to our safety, our value, our worth, our lives.
57:39: We need to be internationalists, and I think this moment makes it really clear that anti-Blackness is global, that the US is the global police, and that wherever police and militarism and borders are connected — and certainly that’s going to become even more relevant not only through war but through climate catastrophe — that we need to be fighting on all of those fronts with comrades and informed by comrades. I learned about movements to defund police from South African anti-apartheid organizers.
59:08: We also need to practice the world that we want — to fill the space with the world that we want. And that means self-accountability, that means accountability within organizations, that means accountability within communities, and that means practicing mutual aid in all the ways that you’ve taught us so much about, Dean.
