Episode 25 - Ten Things We Learned About Black Lives Matter
We wanted to do something to lend our voices in support of the Black Lives Matter protests. As allies, the best way we could think to do this was to highlight our own learning journeys. So here are five things each of us have learned since the killing of George Floyd.
What Kristen Learned
1. Americans have donated an unprecedented amount of money to bail funds around the country, including $30 million for the Minnesota Freedom Fund.
Community bail funds are really important because they free people who are being imprisoned without having been convicted of a crime.
470,000 Americans in local jails have not been convicted of a crime; they are in jail because they cannot afford the bail bond that has been set for them. Over half of the people in jail who could not make bail were parents of children under 18. Bail can cost thousands of dollars or more. Many view it as discriminatory and unjust. Bail is also racist: bail rates are twice as high for racialized Americans.
Bail can be used in an undemocratic way. The threat of arrest and pretrial imprisonment are deterrents to political protest. Police sometimes use arrest as a tactic for suppressing protest. Bail funds can help to support democratic dissent by providing a financial safety net against pretrial detention.
At least 9,300 protesters have been arrested in the American George Floyd protests so far.
Black Lives Matter learned the importance of bail funds from their experience in the 2014 protests following the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. But this isn’t by any means a new tactic. Black Americans have been pooling money to free family members and friends going back to the slavery era.
Donating to bail funds is a good way to support protesters who are arrested in the course of exercising their rights to peacefully dissent. The use of bail and legal defence funds can combat the punitive measures that police try to impose and alleviate the pressure to plead guilty.
If you want more information, here is a guide to donating through bail funds, community organizations, and direct aid.
2. Most Canadian police forces do not wear body cameras.
The Calgary Police implemented a body camera policy in 2018, following the conviction of an officer of assaulting an Indigenous man. But most Canadian police forces do not use body cams.
Body cameras have been successfully piloted by some police forces. Toronto Police ran a successful pilot project using body cameras in 2016. Although body cameras were recommended as an outcome of the pilot project, the department ignored the recommendation.
The recent death of Regis Korchinski-Paquet in Toronto has renewed calls for the use of body cameras on the Toronto Police force. Korchinski-Paquet’s death is still under investigation, but the mother alleges that Korchinski-Paquet was pushed off of the balcony by police. Though we may never know what happened, as police were the only ones inside the unit with Korchinski-Paquet, her situation echoes several other killings in the GTA by police in situations where the victim was experiencing a mental health crisis. In 2015 Andrew Loku was shot dead within five minutes of police arriving at his apartment. D’Andre Campbell was fatally shot by police in April 2020 by the Peel Police in Brampton. Mental health was a factor in all three incidents, which highlights ongoing problems with police’s ability to de-escalate.
The other unifying factor in all three of these cases (and others) is race. Black people in Toronto are twenty-times more likely to be shot by police, according to an Ontario Human Rights Commission report.
A petition calling for Toronto police officers to be equipped with body cameras has more than 100,000 signatures. You can sign it by clicking here.
The RCMP piloted body cameras twice: in 2010 and 2013. Then they did a feasibility study, which was released in 2015. While the technical requirements of body cameras listed in the feasibility study matched an existing device made by Axon, the RCMP announced a year later that they were indefinitely postponing the implementation of body cameras due to a lack of available technology. The feasibility report itself found that using the technology would be worthwhile to improve accountability and transparency.
On May 5, 2020, a 31-year old man in Clyde River, Nunavut, was killed in an altercation with an RCMP officer. This incident inspired renewed calls for the RCMP to wear body cameras. The Nunavut RCMP is currently under investigation for three police shootings in 2020. And that’s just the cases in Nunavut, which has a population under 40,000 people.
3. There is a thing called a public health approach to crime prevention, and it’s pretty cool.
A public health approach essentially treats crime and violence as a contagious disease rather than an individual moral failing. And because it is an illness, violence can be treated. The public health approach seeks to prevent violence by proactively addressing the social factors that make it more likely to spread, rather than reactively punishing perpetrators. And it recognizes that violence reflects inequalities in society.
Basically, the idea is: “If dangerous behaviour is like a contagious disease, perhaps positive relationships can serve as an antidote.” (quote from this article) This approach uses public health principles to carry out interventions that prevent violence through the contextual factors that influence it. For instance, people that experience violence often perpetrate it themselves. It tends to be service-based, rather than punitive. So, you might address things like homelessness, addiction, trauma, and unemployment.
Scotland has effectively used this approach to reduce the murder rate in Glasgow by 60%. It is the only country that has a public health model embedded across its police force.
To deploy a public health, you have to really understand a community and what is driving violence – since the causes aren’t the same everywhere. But one solution that has been used in a few places, including Philadelphia, is converting empty lots into green spaces – basically making them into parks. Studies have found that this project reduced crime and made nearby residents feel safer.
4. The extent to which municipal budgets are dominated by spending on police.
Calls to defund the police generally are not about abolishing the police completely – although that is a position that some have. More commonly, though, defunding the police means remedying an imbalance in how we allocate resources. It means spending more on education, mental health, housing, poverty reduction, transit, and any number of other things.
Which makes a lot of sense when you consider that municipal budgets are often dominated by spending on police. In Toronto, for instance, more than 20% of property tax revenue ($703.31 of an average property tax bill of $3020) goes to police. It is the single largest expenditure. And that’s actually small compared to some other places. Percent of operating budget spent on policing in a few American cities:
And part of the problem is that police budgets have been increasing at the same time as we disinvest from other kinds of social spending, or at a higher rate of increase than other spending areas. Vancouver’s spending on police has increased by 140% since 2001.
Elamin Abdelmahmoud talked about this in a really accessible way on the June 4 episode of the Party Lines podcast.
5. It’s okay to fuck up.
“The beauty of anti-racism is that you don’t have to pretend to be free of racism to be anti-racist. Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself.” – Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want to Talk About Race.
There are lots of good resources on allyship out there, but I particularly recommend this one, this one (which actually argues that the term ally is problematic, as the fight needs to be ours too), this one, and this one.
Lots of these guides point out that on our learning journey, allies will discover lots of things that are obvious to the people experiencing that form of oppression, in this case racism. And inevitably, in the process of becoming an ally, you are going to fuck up. You will fuck up more at first, and less over time. But you will always fuck up a little because the only way to truly understand oppression is to live it.
That is kind of a freeing notion. It means that you should try to do your best, but if you approach the fight with earnest intentions and humility you’ll be fine. Apologize when you fuck up and don’t take it personally. It also means that there is always more to learn. This guide offers some good questions that you can ask yourself to become a better ally.
On your learning journey, you have to teach yourself. Don’t put this burden on your BIPOC friends, colleagues, and acquaintances. They have enough shit to deal with. Sometimes if a friend is close enough they can answer questions, but you have to really know that relationship and know that the person you are asking feels comfortable enough to say no to you. As a starting point why not check out this resource, which answers common questions about the Black Lives Matter movement? You can also check out this antiracist reading list.
Because it’s actually not about you. Try asking yourself what BIPOC people are getting out of you as a potential ally, and how you can be better.
What Kyla Learned
1. Looting
Here is an article discussing the responses to the argument “looting never solves anything”.
Terry Nguyen has written an interesting and more nuanced article on looting as well.
And one more article about wealth redistribution, because I can’t help myself and the real looters are people and companies who hoard wealth and don’t pay tax.
I. Most of the looting, at least in New York, appears not to have been done by protesters but by opportunists not associated with the protests.
II. We’re living through a time when people, especially in the USA, can’t get their basic needs met during a pandemic where many have lost their jobs and the healthcare attached to those jobs. People are angry and desperate and the police are instigating violence during these protests.
III. The media focuses on looting, saying it takes away from the cause, when they’re the ones who choose to focus on it instead of focusing on the cause. The vast majority of protesters are there for the cause and not looting.
IV. It’s pretty hypocritical considering how Canada and the USA were founded on property theft from the people who already lived here.
V. After years of peaceful protests being ignored, maybe some property damage will get the attention needed for systemic change.
VI. People’s lives are more important than property.
VII. Large companies are guilty of wage theft. Nearly $15bn/yr in the US. Even if these companies didn’t have insurance, they can stand to lose a few items off the sales floor.
VIII. Most places have insurance, even the small businesses.
IX. People’s lives are more important than property.
To finish this first section, here is a quote from an Atlantic article by Olga Khazan:
For one thing, looters and peaceful protesters aren’t typically the same people. Dana Fisher, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, has studied protests for 20 years, and she says it’s rare for peaceful protesters to start stealing and setting fires at random. People flock to the sites of protests with different motivations, and those who want peace tend to stay peaceful. “I’ve never seen somebody come in who’s peaceful and then it’s like, Hey, they just broke that window over there. I’m going to now start looting,” she told me.
Those in the looting group also have varied motivations. In their 1968 study, Dynes and Quarantelli note that vandalism during protests focuses on objects and buildings that are “symbolic of other values.” For example, people are more likely to attack symbols of authority—such as the CNN building or police cars—than apartment buildings.
In this way, some of the looting is a lashing-out against capitalism, the police, and other forces that are seen as perpetuating racism. “Widespread looting, then, may perhaps be interpreted as a kind of mass protest against our dominant conceptions of property,” Dynes and Quarantelli wrote. It is a “bid for the redistribution of property.”
2. Counter-Intelligence Program
Credit to a twitter thread from Claire Willett that was circulating.
Started by J. Edgar Hoover, it was an illegal spying operation run by the FBI meant to discredit progressive activist movements, mostly the Black Civil rights leaders. Behind the Bastards have covered the Black Panthers, and it’s well worth a listen. Here’s Part One and Part Two.
3. Police officers are worse than I thought
They don’t need military gear.
They’ll pretend to support protesters for the optics and escalate situations after the photos are taken.
It’s nearly impossible to prosecute or fire a cop. Police Unions will often protect officers who should be prosecuted.
4. Defunding the police means reinvesting in social programs. See Kristen’s 3rd point above
5. I’ve learned more about awful historical hate crimes.
However bad I thought history was, learning the details makes it so much worse. Schools need to be teaching black history in the normal curriculum. If you support this, send your Minister of Education a quick email saying so!