[P2P-F] Fwd: 24: Can the commons replace the cops?

Wed Aug 26 13:01:59 CEST 2020

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Commons Transition <hello at guerrillamedia.coop>
Date: Wed, Aug 26, 2020 at 5:45 PM
Subject: 24: Can the commons replace the cops?
To: <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>

"Abolition is about presence, not absence. It's about building
life-affirming institutions" - Ruth Wilson Gilmore
View this email in your browser
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Can the commons replace cops?

Dear fellow commoners,

Earlier this week, someone shared a post from 2018 that really struck me.
It read: "If you call the cops and say "I'm homeless and starving, please
help me!" they are not required to (and most likely will not) help you in
any way. But, if someone calls them and says "I saw someone taking food out
of the trash and sleeping on a park bench!" they are typically obligated to
come arrest you or at least chase you away. And yet, people will swear up
and down that policing is an essential service that is designed to protect
us. They don't protect people. They protect property. If you don't have
(enough) property, then your protection does not matter to them."

The sentiment of this statement has felt incredibly apparent these past few
months with, amongst others, the US killings of George Floyd
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=f92236409a&e=6fd37f6402>
in May, Breonna
Taylor (for which justice has STILL NOT BEEN SERVED
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=4fb7d79848&e=6fd37f6402>)
in her bed in March and this week's shooting of Jacob Blake
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=9cda42a0a0&e=6fd37f6402>
seven times in his back by police in Wisconsin, in front of his three young
children, as he tried to break up a fight. It's clear that police
brutality, and violence against Black people, people of colour and
marginalised people in general, are deeply systemic issues
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=7d0ec3dd9f&e=6fd37f6402>.
And it's not just happening in the USA; countries the world over have
countless examples of police brutality; prioritising protection of property
and power and acting with systemic prejudice. Take a look at the UK
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=5c0945aadb&e=6fd37f6402>,
South Africa
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=34bffccfff&e=6fd37f6402>,
Mexico
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=24c91da9ba&e=6fd37f6402>
and
India
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=19175cb412&e=6fd37f6402>
as just a few examples.
The events of the past months have ignited a more mainstream conversation
about what it might look like to 'defund' or 'abolish' the police and to
invest in preventing the causes of crime; and spending the money that would
usually be spent on policing on schools, hospitals and healthcare, better
housing, mental health support and domestic violence interventions.
Defunding the police would also look like co-creating alternative systems
to prevent and repond to violent crimes.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=04584ed3a4&e=6fd37f6402>
What does defund the police actually mean? From The Guardian.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=9bd2e58ca7&e=6fd37f6402>
There's been some incredible groundwork laid by people and groups the world
over to work towards police-less communities (some examples of which I will
share below) and it's a topic of great importance for those of us who are
interested in a more mainstream transition to commoning. If the commons can
be considered a social system for democratically, equitably and sustainably
managing the resources of a community; then there are important
conversations to be had about what justice and security might look like in
more collaborative, localised, close-knit systems, with minimal or no
reliance on the market or state.

With the City of Minneapolis pledging to disband the police
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=a473b73095&e=6fd37f6402>
; Los Angeles City Council cutting its police budget
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=66e5369e4c&e=6fd37f6402>
and the New York abolish the police campaign gaining steam - the
possibility of a police-free world isn't out of the question.

I'd love to know of practical projects and resources that address police
abolition and alternatives from a commons perspective - I struggled to find
them. If you know of any, please send them my way. I leave you with this
cute animation from Dan Nott
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=46c4fbe9ba&e=6fd37f6402>imagining
a police-free future.

With much love,

Elsie

*Commoning around the world*
*Open Policing Project*

Hey, the commons is also helping with tracking police/public interactions
in the USA. The Stanford Open Policing project is collecting and
standardizing data on vehicle and pedestrian stops from law enforcement
departments across the country and making that information freely
available. To-date they gathered over 200 million records from dozens of
state and local police departments across the country.

Find out more about the project here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=7140f2594d&e=6fd37f6402>
*Isn't that public safety?*

Luna Syenite made a series of wicked posters a couple of years ago that
imagined alternatives to policing.

They demonstrate some really creative alternative responses to some of the
situations that we might typically anticipate the police to be involved in
(whether they should be or not).

See them all here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=49074f5862&e=6fd37f6402>
*MPD150: A People's Project Evaluating Policing*

MPD150 is a Minneapolis-based, participatory, horizontally-organized effort
by local organizers, researchers, artists and activists. The goal of this
initiative is to shift the discussion of police violence in Minneapolis
from one of procedural reforms to one of meaningful structural change.

Find out more here
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=62904396c9&e=6fd37f6402>
and
read their vision for a police-free future here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=9f98d0513e&e=6fd37f6402>

It's also worth checking out their Minneapolis-based allies Reclaim the
Block too here
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=252ba22f88&e=6fd37f6402>
 and the national Defund the Police campaign here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=0d7ac73a0c&e=6fd37f6402>
*Ankinyi Wirranjiki Night Patrol*

Ankinyi Wirranjiki Night Patrols have been a part of community life in
Tennant Creek in Australia's Northern Territory going back to the 1980s.

According to the project, the Ankini Wirranjiki team, comprised entirely of
indigenous people, plays a vital role in community safety, while
successfully referring clients to external service providers for follow-up
support.

Find out more here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=505e31bf7f&e=6fd37f6402>
*Participatory budgeting*

Movement4BlackLives put forward a new approach to public budgets and
revenues in order to ensure that resources are raised equitably and follow
the needs and fulfil the full human rights of Black communities. To do this
they are calling for participatory budgeting: flipping the way budgets are
developed by starting with assessing people’s
fundamental needs, prioritizing the needs of communities suffering from
injustice and then raising revenue in an equitable way to fund
needs-based budgets. This process must be fully participatory, transparent
and accountable.

Find out more here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=c1faa0b04d&e=6fd37f6402>
*Communal Justices of the Peace in Venezuela *

At the local level, a movement of communal justice is gradually spreading
an alternative to the traditional adversarial court system to settle civil
disputes.

Read the full article (from 2014) here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=eceea2ff3b&e=6fd37f6402>
*Restorative Justice Practices of Native American, First Nation and Other
Indigenous People of North America*

This is part one in a series of articles about restorative justice
practices of Native American, First Nation and other indigenous people of
North America.

Access the interviews here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=ba667f3fa0&e=6fd37f6402>
*In the community*
*Design for Cultural Commons courses*

Design for Cultural Commons has put together a series of courses on
cultural/urban commons practices which will enable you to rigorously
develop new forms of commons that we have not yet created without having to
do a full MA/MPhil/PhD.

For more details click here
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=037b279d07&e=6fd37f6402>
or email Torange at t.khonsari at londonmet.ac.uk
<t.khonsari at londonmet.ac.uk?subject=via%20The%20Commoner>.
*Stir to Action Festival*

*1-3 September 2020, online, £10*

The Playground for the New Economy festival is back and going online for
2020.

Join Stir to Action for three days of conversations, interactive workshops,
idea surgeries, virtual experiences, live podcasts, and more.

See the line up and find out more here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=ce189697d7&e=6fd37f6402>
*Learning lab for action and policy development *

*8 September, 6 October, 12th November 2020, online*

This is a traineeship event about how we partner up over organizational
borders to co-create futures for culture, arts, and city/regional
development. The event is a part of the Cultural and Creative Cities and
Spaces project.

Places are limited. Find out more and register here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=f9036ceb3b&e=6fd37f6402>
*Creative Commons Global Summit*

*19-24 October, online, free*

The 2020 CC Global Summit, to be held 19-24 October 2020, will be entirely
online and free of cost. The event will be held in a variety of timezones
and include programming in five languages: Arabic, English, French,
Mandarin, and Spanish. By doing so, CC hopes the virtual version of the CC
Global Summit will provide the open community with an intimate and
localized space to gather and connect.

Find out more here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=9aec05e44f&e=6fd37f6402>
*This week, we are also reading (and watching)*
*Abolition across the Atlantic*

*By Paul. T. Clarke*

Why are South Africans not in the streets against police brutality like
Americans are? It has less to do with the internet or middle classes. South
Africans are captured by punitive logics. Break that.

Read the full article here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=18b8c8822a&e=6fd37f6402>
*Building a police-free future: Frequently Asked Questions*

Available in English, Spanish and Somali, MPD150's FAQ Zine is meant to be
a starting point. It’s short, and shares the basics of what we’re talking
about when we talk about abolition. It’s been a very useful tool for
sparking conversations with people who haven’t considered these ideas
before.

Read and download it here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=7e54a8cc11&e=6fd37f6402>
*Reina Gossett + Dean Spade (Part 3): What About the Dangerous People?*

Part 3 in a series of four short online videos produced by BCRW featuring
activists Reina Gossett and Dean Spade discussing prison abolition as a
political framework, exploring why this is a top issue for those committed
to supporting trans and gender-nonconforming people.

Watch the video here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=e18ba4de85&e=6fd37f6402>
*The end of policing*

*By Alex S. Vitale*

This book attempts to spark public discussion by revealing the tainted
origins of modern policing as a tool of social control. It shows how the
expansion of police authority is inconsistent with community empowerment,
social justice—even public safety. Drawing on groundbreaking research from
across the world, and covering virtually every area in the increasingly
broad range of police work, Alex Vitale demonstrates how law enforcement
has come to exacerbate the very problems it is supposed to solve.

In contrast, there are places where the robust implementation of policing
alternatives—such as legalization, restorative justice, and harm
reduction—has led to reductions in crime, spending, and injustice. The best
solution to bad policing may be an end to policing.

Find the book here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=152d146056&e=6fd37f6402>
*Before the police were abolished...*

"Here's something a little different for Friday. I've been studying,
writing about, and practicing transformative justice for years. After a
year of writing weekly photo essays, almost a third of them are about
accountability. The idea of writing another one during this encouraging and
overwhelming month was really challenging to me. So, to help keep my morale
up, I decided to write about police and prisons in past tense, as if they
had already been abolished."

Read it here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=d096c7e0af&e=6fd37f6402>
*How to defund the police*

*By Alexis Okeowo*

"The billions of dollars that the country has spent on policing in the past
five years, he went on, have helped build forces that, on average, kill a
thousand people every year; that spending may also have left the country’s
health-care system unprepared to deal with an ongoing crisis. Protesters on
the streets and, increasingly, people at home are arguing for a change in
priorities."

Read the full article here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=06fbdfd389&e=6fd37f6402>
*Police Abolition: A Series of links*

Since 2014, The Marshall Project has been curating some of the best
criminal justice reporting from around the web. Here is their curated list
of articles on the topic of police abolition, with a US focus.

Find them here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=fd1a7dff5b&e=6fd37f6402>
*Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez asked what defunding the police would look like,
and responds: 'a suburb'*

"Affluent white communities already live in a world where they choose to
fund youth, health, housing etc more than they fund police. "

AOC with the truth bombs as always.

Read the full article here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=eddf98d4e6&e=6fd37f6402>
*Prison abolition with Mariame Kaba and Flynn Nicholls - a comic*

"Policing and prisons are inherently ineffective at helping us find justice
and peace. Dismantling all systems of oppression is a necessary component
to ensuring that people are safe. We want resources, not violence."

Read the comic here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=79ba1a3500&e=6fd37f6402>
*What kind of security policy better serves democracy?*

What type of security policy at home and abroad do we need to make our
democracies fit for purpose? A key panel discussion for our times.

Read the full article here.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=1318aa9bd2&e=6fd37f6402>
Image quote that reads "Abolition is about presence, not absence. It's
about building life-affirming institutions" - Ruth Wilson Gilmore. From MPD
150.
<https://commonstransition.us3.list-manage.com/track/click?u=264f449ada6578c5f4b1aff25&id=ea97a34723&e=6fd37f6402>
See you in a couple of weeks!
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