Speaker 1: Good morning, peeps, and welcome to Wika f Daily with
Speaker 1: me your girl, Danielle Moody. This week we are reflecting
Speaker 1: on the year of hate, and as a part of
Speaker 1: that reflection, we are going back through our treasure trove
Speaker 1: of interviews that we've had throughout the year, and one
Speaker 1: of them stood out to me in many many ways.
Speaker 1: You know, after the murder of George Floyd, we've begun
Speaker 1: as a nation to have a real mainstreamed conversation about
Speaker 1: police reform, that how could it be that with the
Speaker 1: eighteen hundred police departments around this country, that we could
Speaker 1: continue to refer to those that take the lies of
Speaker 1: unarmed black people as bad apples, that we could continue
Speaker 1: to shrug off the number of people that are murdered
Speaker 1: each and every day at the hands of people who
Speaker 1: took an oath and wear a badge that says to
Speaker 1: protect and serve. The question collectively, finally, that we were
Speaker 1: having after the murder of George Floyd was who are
Speaker 1: the police there to protect? Who are they there to serve? Now,
Speaker 1: in the black community, we have known all too well.
Speaker 1: It was the reason why the klu Klux Klan wore
Speaker 1: hoods because many of those same people that were attached
Speaker 1: to the quote unquote justice system were the very clansmen
Speaker 1: that were participating in the lynching, the beatings, and the
Speaker 1: hangings of innocent black people, but would serve as the
Speaker 1: police chiefs and the judges. We have a legacy in
Speaker 1: this country that has allowed white supremacy and violence to
Speaker 1: be shrouded in blue. We have created policies and systems
Speaker 1: that allow them to do harm without fear of any
Speaker 1: persecution at all. When a police officer is actually convicted,
Speaker 1: we all exhale because we have been holding our brats
Speaker 1: throughout the entirety of the Chauvin case. Because even with
Speaker 1: the videos, the angles, the witnesses who broke down on
Speaker 1: the stand, who refuse to turn away because somebody needed
Speaker 1: to see what was being done, we didn't believe that
Speaker 1: the justice system would do the right thing, because it
Speaker 1: rarely ever does not when the victims are black or brown,
Speaker 1: or poor for that matter. In her book Becoming Abolitionists
Speaker 1: Police Protests in the Pursuit of Freedom, Dereka Purnell unpacks
Speaker 1: her own journey to abolition to the belief that police
Speaker 1: and policing and police forces are nothing more than a polacebo.
Speaker 1: She writes, calling them felt like something, and something feels
Speaker 1: like everything when the other option seems like nothing. But
Speaker 1: there have been too many times when we have heard
Speaker 1: stories of people calling the police and death following that
Speaker 1: phone call. Whether family members are calling the police because
Speaker 1: a loved one is in mental distress, because we have
Speaker 1: no other system, no other place to call. Yet we know,
Speaker 1: good God damn well that the police aren't trained to
Speaker 1: do a fucking thing, not as it pertains to the escalation.
Speaker 1: They can only seem to de escalate so long as
Speaker 1: the person is wielding a weapon and is white. Because
Speaker 1: if God forbid, they have a book or a cell
Speaker 1: phone and happen to be black or brown, Well, you
Speaker 1: have just cemented certain death with the phone call to police.
Speaker 1: We have watched right in the videos of the many
Speaker 1: parents Amy Cooper, who knew just how to inflect her
Speaker 1: voice and dramatize her fear of a very dangerous bird
Speaker 1: watching black man in Central Park. We continue to hear
Speaker 1: stories of police officers using, time and time again the
Speaker 1: good old rope. They seemed dangerous, I couldn't see, I'm
Speaker 1: under pressure, and I feared from my life. Well, what
Speaker 1: the fuck is your training for You're the one with
Speaker 1: the gun. Kim Potter right took out her taser or
Speaker 1: thought she did, Oh oops, it was my nine millimeter.
Speaker 1: There are so many names, so many names, and so
Speaker 1: many names that we will not know of those whose
Speaker 1: lives were stone len by police. We just learned not
Speaker 1: too recently, right about the United States government dropping a
Speaker 1: bomb in nineteen eighty six folks in Philadelphia to take
Speaker 1: out black activists. Right, We just learned about that that
Speaker 1: it wasn't just the mobs of armed white supremacists that
Speaker 1: would destroy and murder hundreds of black people in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Speaker 1: That just recently was referred to as a massacre for
Speaker 1: the first time by a sitting fucking president. But somebody
Speaker 1: authorized the bombs that were dropping from overhead. Somebody authorized
Speaker 1: police not to give a fuck, right because they were participating.
Speaker 1: And that has been true through history. This is part
Speaker 1: of what Dereka Purnell states in becoming abolitionist. For more
Speaker 1: than a century, activists in the United States have tried
Speaker 1: to reform the police, from community policing initiatives to increasing diversity.
Speaker 1: None of it has stopped the police from killing about
Speaker 1: three people a day. Think about that, Folks, in what position,
Speaker 1: in what industry, in what career could you have those
Speaker 1: type of incidents and there not be a significant fucking
Speaker 1: policy change and overhaul. But for the police, I don't
Speaker 1: know one. She goes on, Millions of people continued to
Speaker 1: protest police violence because these quote solutions do not match
Speaker 1: the problem. The police cannot be reformed. In becoming abolitionists,
Speaker 1: Dereka Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer,
Speaker 1: and organizer. Initially skeptical about police abolition, she details in
Speaker 1: this multiracial social movement rooted in rebellion, risk taking, and
Speaker 1: revolutionary love, how it pushed her and a generation of
Speaker 1: activists towards abolition. Now, if you remember, on the ballot
Speaker 1: this year was police abolition in Minneapolis, and it failed.
Speaker 1: Activists who were for abolition will say that this failure
Speaker 1: right was indeed progress because it would be the first time,
Speaker 1: the first time, in all of the years and all
Speaker 1: of the decades fighting for police reform, that even the
Speaker 1: idea of abolition, which had finally penetrated the consciousness of
Speaker 1: the country, would even be considered as an option. But
Speaker 1: much in the same way that Fox News and the
Speaker 1: Republicans ride on fear. We do the same thing with policing.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, if we get rid of the police,
Speaker 1: then rape will be up and murder will be up.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, we've had police since the beginning of time.
Speaker 1: You see, they were the slave troll They were the
Speaker 1: ones that made sure that those that were trying to
Speaker 1: escape to freedom never made it. And since we have
Speaker 1: had police, there's been a rise in all sorts of
Speaker 1: crime and murder and rape and persecute, all of these things.
Speaker 1: And the response has always been, oh, we need more police.
Speaker 1: When have you ever heard of police stopping actual fucking
Speaker 1: crime as opposed to showing up after the fact. We
Speaker 1: have more incidents of people with special needs and disabilities
Speaker 1: being murdered by police when called because oh, they don't
Speaker 1: know what to do. But we have never created or
Speaker 1: put resources into any other initiatives or entities so that
Speaker 1: we take that task that clearly they cannot do away
Speaker 1: from armed officers. You know, it is a tangled web.
Speaker 1: Our injustice system, our legal system, our police system just
Speaker 1: continuing to feed the beast. People in this country are
Speaker 1: addicted to the police because you have been lied to
Speaker 1: in thinking that their presence means your safety, when in fact,
Speaker 1: when we continue to look at the wealthiest places in
Speaker 1: this country, when we look at tree lined neighborhoods in
Speaker 1: the suburbs, you never see the police, you never hear
Speaker 1: a siren, and yet those are the safest areas. And
Speaker 1: why is that? Oh, because their property taxes provide for
Speaker 1: them the better schools and the community centers and the
Speaker 1: country clubs and the sidewalks and everything that we know
Speaker 1: to be true create safe communities. But what do we
Speaker 1: continue to do in low income communities and black and
Speaker 1: brown communities. We flood them with police, but we don't
Speaker 1: provide supermarkets, we don't provide actual banks, we don't provide jobs,
Speaker 1: we don't provide schools that don't look like fucking prisons.
Speaker 1: And then we wonder why there is crime, why there
Speaker 1: is distrust of the police, Because for the moment that
Speaker 1: you're able to get to school on your own, you're
Speaker 1: being thrown up against a police car and harassed. So
Speaker 1: Dereka Parnell's journey in becoming abolitionists is about looking across,
Speaker 1: as she would say, geography and time, looking at places
Speaker 1: from Ferguson to South Africa from reconstruction, as she writes
Speaker 1: to the contemporary police protests and shootings and say, what
Speaker 1: does it really mean to be free? To get free?
Speaker 1: But we are so addicted to violence in this country
Speaker 1: that can't reform policing because we don't have the ability
Speaker 1: to imagine something better, something different. I can tell you
Speaker 1: that in all my years riding public transportation, whether it
Speaker 1: be the Metro in DC, or the subway in New York,
Speaker 1: or in whatever place that I am, anytime that I
Speaker 1: see a group of police officers either get on to
Speaker 1: a train car or b at a subway station, I
Speaker 1: avoid them like the fucking plague. Nowhere have I ever
Speaker 1: seen a group of police officers gathered and thought to myself, oh,
Speaker 1: I feel safe. Any time that I've ever seen flashing
Speaker 1: lights behind me or go by me, my heart rate
Speaker 1: speeds up and breath leaves my body. That should not
Speaker 1: be the consistent feeling that black and brown people have
Speaker 1: in this country when they come face to face with police.
Speaker 1: You shouldn't have one community have to tell their child
Speaker 1: a story about how to stay alive and think that
Speaker 1: you live in a system that is safe and for
Speaker 1: all people. We have believed the lie and what this
Speaker 1: conversation with Dereka Parnell offers is a way out. But
Speaker 1: will we ever be bold enough to get there? Will
Speaker 1: we ever actually vote for our own liberation from policing
Speaker 1: and violence without accountability? Folks? I am so excited to
Speaker 1: welcome to wokaf Daily for the first time author Dereka Purnell,
Speaker 1: who is the author of a book whose title I
Speaker 1: just love, Becoming Abolitionists. Dereka, we have talked about abolition
Speaker 1: on woke a f in so many different forms, in
Speaker 1: so many different ways, about what it means to abolish something,
Speaker 1: what it means to purge it, right, And I think
Speaker 1: that in order to purge something you have to recognize it.
Speaker 1: You have to recognize its ills, the troubles, the trauma,
Speaker 1: the grief that it is bringing. When we talked about
Speaker 1: abolitionists during slavery, we were, you know, abolishing a system
Speaker 1: of depravity, of cruelty, of horrifics treatment of human beings.
Speaker 1: When you wrote this book and you're and the title
Speaker 1: becoming Abolitionists, what does that mean to you? Oh? Wow?
Speaker 1: I love this question. I love the foreground and so
Speaker 1: the one. Thank you so much for having me I'm
Speaker 1: very excited about this conversation. I went back and forth
Speaker 1: on titles. It was very hard trying to figure out
Speaker 1: which title made the most sense for this book. And
Speaker 1: the reason why I ultimately landed on becoming abolitionists with
Speaker 1: this plural sue is because to be an abolitionist, I believe,
Speaker 1: is to always be in the process of the journey
Speaker 1: and reevaluating what makes the most sense for the future
Speaker 1: that we want to build. Right and so like the
Speaker 1: reasons why I was an abolitionist when I first started
Speaker 1: writing the book are very different than some of the
Speaker 1: things that I have right now. And it's just allowing
Speaker 1: yourself to be curious enough to ask questions, to be
Speaker 1: in a conversation with people, to be wrong sometime, to
Speaker 1: reflect to say, oh wow, I used to think this
Speaker 1: about myself. I used to think it's about the world.
Speaker 1: I used to think this about police and prisons, And
Speaker 1: now with more information, I have new better reasons to
Speaker 1: not want the police to be here, or I have
Speaker 1: new better reasons why, well, I don't think that we
Speaker 1: should have prisons in this society. And so in the book,
Speaker 1: I try to show that journey for me, but also
Speaker 1: for other people right ten twelve years ago, I guess
Speaker 1: ten years ago, Oh my gosh, ten years ago, about
Speaker 1: ten years ago when George Immerman killed Treymon and Martin.
Speaker 1: There are so many of us who were fighting, spending hours, sacrificing,
Speaker 1: you know, our work, our families, our school to make
Speaker 1: sure that someone was arrested. That is what we put
Speaker 1: that energy in. And there are so many of those
Speaker 1: people who were at the forefront of those movements who
Speaker 1: now don't even believe in arrests, don't even believe in prisons,
Speaker 1: don't even believe in police. And I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about that because when people critique abolitionists, they'll say something like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, this isn't realistic. When we tried realistic thing.
Speaker 1: We have spent our lives learning about the realistic way
Speaker 1: you're supposed to hold someone accountabile, accountable. And now that
Speaker 1: we know that those systems were never intended to actually
Speaker 1: offer true justice, true accountability, and so we're constantly becoming
Speaker 1: examining what kinds of systems that we want to abolish
Speaker 1: and then what we also want to build. You know,
Speaker 1: I love that one because I think that the journey
Speaker 1: that your book lays out is the journey that many
Speaker 1: of us are on right, where we wanted to believe
Speaker 1: in a criminal justice system, in a judicial system that
Speaker 1: was going to see our full humanity, that was going
Speaker 1: to actually uphold the creed that justice is in fact blind. Right.
Speaker 1: I think that from two thousand and what was it,
Speaker 1: two thousand and fourteen until now, right, the amount of hashtags,
Speaker 1: the amount out of unarmed black people that have been murdered,
Speaker 1: the video of nine minutes of George Floyd losing his
Speaker 1: losing having the life squeezed out of him, not losing
Speaker 1: his life, having his life stolen from him. You know,
Speaker 1: I wanted to believe in the beginning when we saw
Speaker 1: Trey Von Martin to your point that there's no doubt
Speaker 1: this is a child, right, this was an adult, and
Speaker 1: so we know that he will be convicted because how
Speaker 1: could he not. And it was in that moment for
Speaker 1: me that I just I the faith that I had
Speaker 1: in our politics, in our government, in our systems began
Speaker 1: to wane. And I want to talk to you about
Speaker 1: these different pinpointed moments because you also lay out very
Speaker 1: clearly where you grew up right, the neighborhoods and how
Speaker 1: they were filled with various forms of violence, whether you're
Speaker 1: talking about environmental injustice factors or you're talking about actual
Speaker 1: crime or the lack of jobs, and you know, good
Speaker 1: schools and hopefulness. What are those kind of pinpoint moments
Speaker 1: that stand out for you over this timeline of moving
Speaker 1: from believing in the probability that a policing system could
Speaker 1: work for black people and then understanding that it was
Speaker 1: never meant to yes. Yes. So I would say that
Speaker 1: early on rather than saying that I like believe that
Speaker 1: this system weren't for us. I think now, having readen
Speaker 1: the Bug and read it like a thousand times while
Speaker 1: all the edits, I think it was probably the most
Speaker 1: accurate thing for me to say is that I had
Speaker 1: really unexamined ideas about policing. Right, I had unexamined ideas
Speaker 1: about my own commitments to policing. I just assume that
Speaker 1: they were here. I didn't ask they came from. I
Speaker 1: didn't ask if we needed them. It was just like, oh,
Speaker 1: police kind of exist, like male people exists, like fire
Speaker 1: five or six, like teacher. They're just they're just a
Speaker 1: part of society. I didn't even have wherewithal I knew
Speaker 1: that there were problematic police. I knew that there were
Speaker 1: police with my mom's friends, right, there was a range
Speaker 1: of and there sometimes there was an overlap, and that
Speaker 1: has been diagram But you know, I just took for
Speaker 1: granted their existence. I really had unexamined commitments to these institutions,
Speaker 1: and so over time, especially when Michael Brown was killed,
Speaker 1: that was one of the first times I started being
Speaker 1: pushed to acts okay, like what is this thing about?
Speaker 1: Like why why is this? Why can't cops just kill
Speaker 1: someone and kind of like go home. It was very
Speaker 1: It was a very huge political awakening for me and
Speaker 1: lots of other people. And what I also realized I
Speaker 1: was doing at that time long alongside lots of other people,
Speaker 1: I was using what white people get, or at least
Speaker 1: what I perceived white people to receive as justice, as
Speaker 1: a metric for what I thought we deserved too. So
Speaker 1: I would say something this happened to a white boy,
Speaker 1: like we already know this black hot would be in jail,
Speaker 1: and we don't even have to guess because Mohammed nor
Speaker 1: in Minnesota end up killing I think Justine Diamond, the
Speaker 1: white woman from Australia, he's in prison, right so we
Speaker 1: would say, you know, if this was a white person,
Speaker 1: this is what would happened. This is a white person,
Speaker 1: this is what would happen. And at some point, by
Speaker 1: being in conversation with other organizers doing more study and
Speaker 1: doing more research learning about the origins of police, I
Speaker 1: have to be like, Wade, what if this system that
Speaker 1: we know is racially unjust? What if it's also not
Speaker 1: working for white people? And we're fighting to get what
Speaker 1: white people will have. We're fighting that white people think,
Speaker 1: And it's just like, what if what if we get
Speaker 1: what white people get? Will that then mean that few
Speaker 1: of black people would die? And I don't think that's
Speaker 1: true because white people kill our police all the time,
Speaker 1: and I just don't want cops to go to prison
Speaker 1: after they kill us. I want the killings to stop.
Speaker 1: I wanted the violence to stop. And so it just
Speaker 1: completely disrupted my noses of justice and fairness and equity
Speaker 1: and I had to let go of that metric. I
Speaker 1: had to ask, is it unfair that we don't have it? Yes?
Speaker 1: But does it mean that it's real justice if we
Speaker 1: get it? And that answer was not clear to me.
Speaker 1: You know that is so illuminating because I think that
Speaker 1: we spend a lot of times comparing comparing ourselves, right,
Speaker 1: comparing what it is that black people don't have versus
Speaker 1: what it is that white people have. The fact is
Speaker 1: is that because we have qualified immunity in this country,
Speaker 1: because you can just be a cop and you can
Speaker 1: fear for your life regardless of who is in front
Speaker 1: of you, kill them and then go home, is in
Speaker 1: fact the problem right and right now. Now, you know,
Speaker 1: just last week we had, after eight months of supposed
Speaker 1: deliberation and back and forth between you know, a Senator
Speaker 1: Corey Booker and Senator Tim Scott, they want to come
Speaker 1: out and be like, Nope, the gap is too large
Speaker 1: for us to do anything about policing reform. So this
Speaker 1: moment of George Floyd having his life squeeze out of
Speaker 1: him for nine minutes that we all watched together, they
Speaker 1: want to tell us after eight months, well, we just
Speaker 1: can't do anything, so we stay with the status quo
Speaker 1: or devolve even worse into the place that we are.
Speaker 1: What does that feel like? How did that feel to you?
Speaker 1: Do you know what I'm saying? Like? After we all
Speaker 1: witnessed this collectively in the midst of quarantine, where we
Speaker 1: are all glued to our devices, glued to our television
Speaker 1: and witnessed this collective horror together. And now eight months
Speaker 1: later they tell us that what we thought was the
Speaker 1: spark of some thing new is now it's just too
Speaker 1: big to do. Yeah. So I felt I think two
Speaker 1: immediate things. The first thing that I felt was immediately
Speaker 1: sympathy for George Floyd's family, because, you know, Joe Biden
Speaker 1: had promised them I'm gonna champion police reform. I intend
Speaker 1: to keep that promise. I got you, We're gonna name
Speaker 1: this after George Floyd. We're gonna, you know, put you
Speaker 1: on front stage at the Democratic National Convention. We're gonna
Speaker 1: rally him. He was doing all of this while also
Speaker 1: still promising to give more money to police, but he
Speaker 1: you ultimately did. So he's walking this fide. You know,
Speaker 1: we're gonna achieve real justice and policing that everyone can enjoy,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna give more money to the police. Okay.
Speaker 1: So I felt horrible for George Floyd's family to have
Speaker 1: that hope. To think that someone you're campaigning for, your
Speaker 1: trying to get them in office, you're on college trying
Speaker 1: to get policy passed. It hurts to think what that
Speaker 1: family is going going through right now. The second the
Speaker 1: second thing that I felt, how can I just what's
Speaker 1: the most honest way to say this. It's not that
Speaker 1: I was not surprised, It's not that I felt let down.
Speaker 1: Because when the George Floyd Act was initially introduced, I
Speaker 1: wrote in my column and I completely just I just
Speaker 1: completely disagree with everything about that bill. So here we
Speaker 1: have a policing bill that I argue wouldn't have even
Speaker 1: saved George Floyd's life, right you know, Derek Chauvin was called.
Speaker 1: Police were called because over an alleged use of a
Speaker 1: counterfeit twenty dollars bill, which is illegal, and if he
Speaker 1: used it, it is illegal, and cops have a constitutional
Speaker 1: power to stop people who's using counterfeit money. You can
Speaker 1: go to jail right now, people watch that is just
Speaker 1: like man over twenty dollars, over twenty dollars. Counterfeit twenty
Speaker 1: dollars bills are an important currency for people who are
Speaker 1: economically and exploited. And we're in a session job crises,
Speaker 1: eviction crises. What could have actually helped people like George Floyd,
Speaker 1: people like my mom, people in our communities was resources,
Speaker 1: more stimulus, actual money. And so if the couple would
Speaker 1: have just came and arrested George Floyd took in the jail,
Speaker 1: there would have been no uprisings, no protests, they would
Speaker 1: have been no like And that's what happens every single day.
Speaker 1: So when I read this bill, I was just like
Speaker 1: the way, at the end of the day, what the
Speaker 1: actual problem was was, you know, people working class people,
Speaker 1: black people living on twenty dollars, counterfeit exchanges. Being police
Speaker 1: now has become a way to give police more money,
Speaker 1: to do more training, to restrict chokeholds. Well, what about
Speaker 1: the poor? Why don't we give them more money to people?
Speaker 1: Why don't we give them more money to police? And
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, I called it in
Speaker 1: that piece and I called it in this piece around
Speaker 1: a couple of days ago. Whenever these reforms get you know,
Speaker 1: they go on tour. What ultimately happens, police get more
Speaker 1: money until the next viral police killing and all the
Speaker 1: reforms that don't even work get put off to the side,
Speaker 1: and three people are still killed every day by police.
Speaker 1: And so it's frustrating that people have to be like, man,
Speaker 1: I really have hope in this bill. I really have
Speaker 1: hope in this policy, and I didn't have any hope
Speaker 1: and it was quite bad, actually, right, it was pretty bad.
Speaker 1: And then it's just like, well, now what now? What
Speaker 1: do you do? So reform isn't a realistic option, like
Speaker 1: and now he's abolist is not realistic? Reform is not realistic.
Speaker 1: You know, it's funny because I have been moving myself
Speaker 1: towards a place where I'm like, I don't even want
Speaker 1: to use the terms reform or reimagine, because you're reimagining
Speaker 1: something that is broken, right, Like you how do you
Speaker 1: reform something? How do you reform a leg that's been amputated?
Speaker 1: You don't, right, Like, you need to create something different.
Speaker 1: And I think for me that's why abolition in and
Speaker 1: of itself feels right, because it is the most honest
Speaker 1: thing because if you want to, if you want to
Speaker 1: create a new system, you don't do so off of
Speaker 1: what is broken, right. You have to abolish what is
Speaker 1: what is present in order to create something new. And
Speaker 1: I feel like that's that's where the energy needs to
Speaker 1: be placed, which is that it's not enough to just say, oh,
Speaker 1: we're going to reform, We're gonna reimagine, we're going to reassess,
Speaker 1: and we're gonna do all of these things, which is
Speaker 1: pretty much playing three card monte with people's lives. You're
Speaker 1: just moving the cards around the table and you're not
Speaker 1: actually doing anything. It's a bullshit magic trick, right, that
Speaker 1: doesn't produce that doesn't produce anything. Um, when when you
Speaker 1: hear the pushback when people talked about defund the police,
Speaker 1: right and folks had said, you know, we should we
Speaker 1: shouldn't say defund, And to your point, at various points
Speaker 1: in the book, you're like, you know, if if we're not,
Speaker 1: if we're if we're if we're talking about reallocation of funds,
Speaker 1: Like then that's the conversation that that's what I have said,
Speaker 1: if we're if defund the police is really talking about
Speaker 1: a reallocation of funds to stop having where I sit
Speaker 1: in New York City, a police department that has a
Speaker 1: budget of six billion dollars, Like when when you know
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, So it's like, it is that language.
Speaker 1: Should it be reallocation, should it be defund? Does it
Speaker 1: matter if if we're still again playing three card monte
Speaker 1: with our criminal justice and policing systems. Yeah, well, I
Speaker 1: like defund the police for lots of reasons. One reason
Speaker 1: is because in twenty fourteen, when Black Lives Matter took
Speaker 1: off as a hashtag, people said black lives matter was divisive,
Speaker 1: like it's polarizing. All lives matter. I mean a lot
Speaker 1: of people didn't say that, not in good faith. It's like, what,
Speaker 1: we'll be on board with police not killing black people,
Speaker 1: but he said black lives matter, So I can't. I
Speaker 1: can't even get It's like, come on, like seriously, so
Speaker 1: if something's black lives matter, it's polarizing that they just matter.
Speaker 1: Like it's like the floor the bar is so low,
Speaker 1: like it's so solo. Right. The second thing I noticed
Speaker 1: around Black Lives Matter is that anyone, once it became
Speaker 1: more palatable, anyone could kind of say black lives matter
Speaker 1: and it not really need anything that much anymore. You
Speaker 1: can say black lives matter to defund the police. You
Speaker 1: can say black lives matter to give more fundy to
Speaker 1: the police and say black communities want this. Sacks fifth
Speaker 1: Avenue was saying black lives matter. Everyone was just sort
Speaker 1: of saying black lives matter. But guess what black lives
Speaker 1: kept dying, right, black people being killed. What's interesting about
Speaker 1: defund the police is that it's a specific policy demand.
Speaker 1: It's like, take money away from the police. It's much
Speaker 1: harder to then just co op something like that. Right.
Speaker 1: I'm not saying it can't be done, because I've seen
Speaker 1: it attempted be them. But it's different. It's not as
Speaker 1: soft as Black lives matter for lack of a better
Speaker 1: phrase right now, And so that's another thing. The third
Speaker 1: thing I would say is that any fight towards freedom
Speaker 1: and justice has always used unpopular language at the time
Speaker 1: of the fight, and then thirty forty fifty years from now,
Speaker 1: what do we do We say? Man, I'm so happy
Speaker 1: that they march for civil rights. Do you know what
Speaker 1: it was like to say that you were marching for
Speaker 1: civil rights in nineteen fifties civil rights? Oh, you must
Speaker 1: be a criminal, you're a troublemaker, as if they call MLK.
Speaker 1: You know, it's to say that you wanted women to
Speaker 1: be able to vote. It's imagine a man in the
Speaker 1: early nineteen hundred saying whoa, whoa, whoa. I would be
Speaker 1: on board with women voting, but I don't like the
Speaker 1: words suffrage. Like this age what we're doing when you
Speaker 1: say right, if the phrase it's seriously the barrier, then
Speaker 1: let's figure out how to explain what the phrase means.
Speaker 1: But I imagine I would have guessed at the people
Speaker 1: who actually don't like the phrase, most of them, not
Speaker 1: all of them. I've met a couple of people have
Speaker 1: really interesting critical arguments and defund the police and abolition right,
Speaker 1: and they are coming from a socialist analysis. They say,
Speaker 1: how do we build a broad basis? People who probably
Speaker 1: agree with what you're saying but don't understand what it means.
Speaker 1: But they are committed to explaining what it means, right,
Speaker 1: which is different than I would get on board, but
Speaker 1: I don't like the language. So you gotta let police
Speaker 1: continue to kill three people a day because of a
Speaker 1: marketing campaign, Well, help us think about, you know, creative
Speaker 1: language and creative ways to explain what abolition is. And
Speaker 1: so part of that is on abolitionists when we say abolition.
Speaker 1: When I say abolition, I mean we need to dismantle, eradicate,
Speaker 1: reduce the reasons why people need police, and we need
Speaker 1: to eradicate the institution of policing, and we need to
Speaker 1: eradicate the violence in society. That make people feel that
Speaker 1: they need police. It's both at the same time, and
Speaker 1: it's over time. Right. So if that's on us to
Speaker 1: do that, what society what people who don't know what
Speaker 1: that means. It's also on them to ask questions, to
Speaker 1: be curious, to critically engage the faith, to read to
Speaker 1: you know, to ask it's it requires both of that.
Speaker 1: But if you are not even open to having a
Speaker 1: conversation because of a term you don't understand, I think
Speaker 1: that's quite unfortunate. And I think there are a lot
Speaker 1: of resources I hate to learn more about what that means.
Speaker 1: I appreciate that so very much because I think you
Speaker 1: know too. One of the lies that we continue to
Speaker 1: tell in our society with regard to policing is that
Speaker 1: more police equals more safety. Oh yeah. And the thing
Speaker 1: that I have been saying on woke f you know,
Speaker 1: interviews with former police chiefs, interviews with abolitionists, activists like yourself,
Speaker 1: is the fact that any I grew up in a
Speaker 1: very white suburb of New York on Long Island, and
Speaker 1: I will tell you that I never saw a police
Speaker 1: officer ever, right, Like, that was not a part of
Speaker 1: my data to if I did maybe they were, you know,
Speaker 1: driving past on you know, on the main strip. What
Speaker 1: I did see were clean sidewalks, tree line streets, gated communities,
Speaker 1: country clubs, and resource centers and libraries and all of
Speaker 1: these things. And so, you know, one of the questions
Speaker 1: that another question that I have for you is how
Speaker 1: do we break that lie that gas alight about the
Speaker 1: fact that when we're talking about defund the police, that
Speaker 1: there's this association, well, oh, you don't want to be safe,
Speaker 1: And I'm like, some of the safest neighborhoods have no
Speaker 1: police presence. What are you talking about? What they do
Speaker 1: have a resources and access? Absolutely yes, So that's and
Speaker 1: the inverse is also true. Right if you look at
Speaker 1: where I grew up in Saint Louis, I did not
Speaker 1: grew up in the community in tree line streets. It
Speaker 1: was very much, very very much the hood still is
Speaker 1: the hood. We haven't had a grocery store since two thousand,
Speaker 1: the year two thousand. Not a grocery store, not a
Speaker 1: fruit market, not a community garden in sight, no health clinics,
Speaker 1: no jobs because the highway ripped apart the most prosperous
Speaker 1: place where black people were employed by a black businesses
Speaker 1: ripped all those homes. Community business has gone, so people
Speaker 1: could commute from the suburbs to downtown Saint Louis to work, right,
Speaker 1: And so you look at a community like that, We
Speaker 1: look at Chicago, you look at DC where I'm sitting
Speaker 1: right now, in northwest, super high rates of like violent crime,
Speaker 1: also among the highest per capital rates of police. And
Speaker 1: so the police presence also doesn't reduce the violence that
Speaker 1: people fear. It's just not. And every time, like right now,
Speaker 1: we're experienced a murder hike, probably because we're in the pandemic.
Speaker 1: People are stressed out, there are fewer jobs, there's an
Speaker 1: eviction ais that's happening. There's so much precarity that leads
Speaker 1: people to more vulnerable situations. And when there's precarity and
Speaker 1: vulnerability and a pandemic, there's violence. Like we know, the
Speaker 1: researchers know this, scientists know this. But then you read
Speaker 1: the New York Times, you read mainstream outlets, and it's like,
Speaker 1: y'all want to defund the police while there's a murder
Speaker 1: spike right now, Well tell me why with a million
Speaker 1: cops in those places, especially in Chicago, Saint Louis, Detroit, DC,
Speaker 1: these neighborhoods, there's more police than anywhere else you have,
Speaker 1: the murder rate is still climbing. It's yeah, so more
Speaker 1: police doesn't even equate to more in safety. What it
Speaker 1: feels like, it feels like, okay, at least somebody's here
Speaker 1: to do something. But it's not until cops are standing
Speaker 1: outside of people's homes every night, guarding and stopping violence.
Speaker 1: That's not what's happening, right, So it's it's yeah, it's
Speaker 1: the inverse is not you as well. So it's like, well,
Speaker 1: what actually keeps people safe? You no resources, strong social
Speaker 1: networks and patient jobs, you know, pushing back on racism, homophobia, transphobia.
Speaker 1: You know. The one of the main reasons why people
Speaker 1: even kill people in the first place is because usually
Speaker 1: men want to control the sexuality of their partners. That
Speaker 1: leads to violence because you've been conditioning to patriarchy. Another
Speaker 1: reason why people end up killing each other is because
Speaker 1: of petty arguments and usually as men, something said and assulted,
Speaker 1: but I have an idea of what a man should be.
Speaker 1: Police can't stop patriarchy. They can't fix patriarchy, so they
Speaker 1: can't get to the root problem of solving harm. You know,
Speaker 1: people join like street games for protection, and then if
Speaker 1: you arrest people who are carrying a gun on them
Speaker 1: for protection and because they're no jobs, like none of
Speaker 1: that stuff is not our communities. And then they go
Speaker 1: to jail, they come out, they have a record. It's
Speaker 1: gonna be even harder for them to get a job,
Speaker 1: harder for them to get in school, harder for them
Speaker 1: to get housing. So they're going to retreat to the
Speaker 1: place where they feel most safe. It's like, how do
Speaker 1: we support all of those people? How do we fight
Speaker 1: for broad sweeping changes so that people can be empower
Speaker 1: and have self determination to work in jobs where they
Speaker 1: have dignity right where they have choices, where they have
Speaker 1: childcare and healthcare and tuition. It like, it's all of
Speaker 1: those answers are there, and it's actually much cheaper to
Speaker 1: just fund police who primarily recruited from the working class
Speaker 1: to police other working class people. It's really really bad. Well,
Speaker 1: I will say this, Ica, is that I believe that
Speaker 1: your book is incredibly important and important in this particular
Speaker 1: moment that we are living in, and I hope that
Speaker 1: everyone picks up becoming abolitionists and thinks about that word
Speaker 1: thinks about that action and why it matters, and instead
Speaker 1: of just shrugging off phrases like defund the police or
Speaker 1: phrases like the black Lives Matter, phrases like you know
Speaker 1: abolition that you actually begin to understand and hack why
Speaker 1: we are saying those things now and why they matter.
Speaker 1: Dereka Purnell, I wish you the best of success with
Speaker 1: your book, Becoming Abolitionists, and I hope that you will
Speaker 1: join us again when you finish your successful tour, because
Speaker 1: I would love to have you back. Yes, please have me.
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed this. Thank you for all of you,
Speaker 1: our kindness and your thoughtful question. I really appreciate it,
Speaker 1: appreciate you. Thank you. That is it for me today.
Speaker 1: Folks on woke f as always, Power to the people
Speaker 1: and to all the people. Power, Get woke and stay
Speaker 1: woke as fuck.