Tricky Design by Tom Fisher Lorraine Gamman

Author:Tom Fisher,Lorraine Gamman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

7

Making ‘Safety’, Making Freedom: Problem-Setting, Collaborative Design and Contested Futures

Shana Agid

The point of departure of the movement lies in the people themselves …. Accordingly, the point of departure must always be with [people] in the ‘here and now’, which constitutes the situation within which they are submerged, from which they emerge, and in which they intervene. Only by starting from this situation – which determines their perception of it – can they begin to move. To do this authentically they must perceive their state as not fated and unalterable, but merely as limiting – and therefore challenging.

Paolo Freire (1970: 85)

While it is important to seek to better understand why people do the things they do and to reduce harm, we need to reject ‘crime’ as a lens of analysis and excavate and separate from ‘crime’ the topics buried within it that matter to us, while drawing attention to power-infused processes of criminalization and punishment.

Melissa Burch (2014)

In May 2013, one year before the police killings of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri and Eric Garner In Staten Island, New York set off massive public protests and the racist violence of policing reached the main stage of US media and political discourse, I met six members of the Critical Resistance (CR) Oakland No Cops working group to begin planning their new campaign. We were in an office with a soft couch, colourful posters, sunlight and just enough space. A group member, Susan,1 and I had planned the agenda together, with feedback from everyone. I facilitated so she could be a full participant. I brought snacks and sticky notes purchased with funds from a small grant. We grabbed markers and big paper from the CR office and got to work.

CR is a US-based organization seeking to abolish the prison industrial complex (PIC), which they define as ‘the overlapping interests of government and industry that designate surveillance, policing and imprisonment as solutions to economic, social and political problems’ (2004: 59). The No Cops group focuses on fighting the impacts of policing in Oakland, California, including the targeting of people of colour, former prisoners, immigrants, queer people and others. Their organizing against police incursions is supported by organizing for other ideas and resources to foster community well-being and self-determination.

We started the workshop by making a timeline of significant ideas, events, policies and memories from members’ research into the recent history of policing in Oakland on the only available vertical space – a wall of windows. Backlit, the timeline showed five years of strategies, elections and a rotating cast of characters in charge. It showed a body count, people of colour of all ages killed by police. It showed changing neighbourhoods, and blocks missing neighbours to prisons around the state. It showed some organized resistance, as well, limited only by our having forgotten to include what CR members called ‘fight back’ as a research focus of its own. As timelines do, it told stories.

No Cops members talked through what they saw, adding memories and analysis as connective tissue.

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