Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Angela Y. Davis

Author:Angela Y. Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 2022-02-02T00:00:00+00:00

Sounds of Abolition by Monica Trinidad, created in collaboration with incarcerated people through the People’s Paper Co-op in 2021.

Violence of Policing

On November 24, 2015, Chicago was again in the streets over the death of another Black youth, seventeen-year-old Laquan McDonald, at the hands of a white police officer. More than a year earlier Laquan McDonald had been shot sixteen times by Jason Van Dyke. Initially ruled a “justifiable homicide,” the dashcam footage of the entire incident, suppressed both by the blue wall of silence and by complicit city officials, was released only after thirteen months of relentless pressure from independent journalists, Laquan McDonald’s family, and a network of small, community-based organizations. The footage was devastating: thirty seconds after he arrived at the scene, Van Dyke fired his gun at McDonald, who was not lunging toward the police but running away.

Until recently, the varied forms of police violence and their familiar targets—Black and brown people, poor people, queers, labor organizers, sex workers, migrants—rarely made headlines. The police killings of Native Americans, the most likely of any racial or ethnic group to be killed by US law enforcement, still rarely receive mainstream media coverage.7 The National Center for Transgender Equality’s US Transgender Survey reported in 2015 that 58 percent of those surveyed who had contact with police or law enforcement officers reported some form of mistreatment.8 Also made invisible is the “slow violence” of how other carceral entities such as social services police bodies, targeting poor women who are overwhelmingly Black and Indigenous—for example, in mandated and random drug tests for meager social assistance benefits like Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF). Policing—in its varied forms—has always been a pandemic.

Chicago has deep histories of resistance to this ongoing violence of policing.9 Just a few years before Laquan McDonald’s death, in 2012, the network We Charge Genocide raised the visibility of another young Black person killed by a white police officer, twenty-two-year-old Rekia Boyd. The group demanded measures of accountability beyond prosecution, and in 2014 We Charge Genocide submitted a shadow or unofficial report to the United Nations, Police Violence Against Chicago’s Youth of Color, documenting the fact that police officers regularly engaged in torture.10 Among their twenty recommendations, We Charge Genocide insisted on defining and creating safety outside of a carceral framework and building alternatives to policing and imprisonment. By 2015 the response to Laquan McDonald’s death and the police coverup felt different from previous uprisings in response to the violence of policing. While calls to prosecute Jason Van Dyke surfaced immediately and the chants in the street were familiar, “No Justice, No Peace, No Racist Police,” different strategies and demands for accountability and transformation gained traction. With almost 40 percent of Chicago’s operating budget already earmarked for policing (15 percent of the city’s total budget including grants), in a political moment when austerity logic justified the closure of public schools and public mental health centers in Black and brown neighborhoods, a network of grassroots activists pushed not to prosecute but to shrink the footprint of policing.

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