Urban League, ACLU call for police, criminal justice reform
23rd June 2020 · 0 Comments
By Ryan Whirty
Contributing Writer
Participants in an online webinar sponsored by the Urban League of Louisiana about police reform on June 16 said that any overhaul of the law enforcement system in the United States must happen within a larger framework of societal and moral change.
Members of three panel discussions – which followed policy and progress briefings by various elected officials – urged people of color, protestors and the allies of racial justice and police reform to consider how factors such as housing insecurity, the lack of adequate community mental health services, productive schools and a living wage for all workers figures into mechanisms like crime, punitive justice, police brutality and funding disparities.
“This is a moment that we cannot afford to lose,” said Marc Morial, the president and CEO of the National Urban League and former mayor of New Orleans. “We cannot lose this public momentum, but we also can’t fail to recognize that a reimagined approach to public safety [means] a reimagined approach to healthy communities.”
Alanah Odums Hebert, the executive director of the ACLU of Louisiana, said that police reform must involve “a dramatic re-envisioning of what a safe society looks like.”
She added that police cannot provide the type of social support services they are currently tasked with undertaking, and police can’t act as counselors or security officers in public schools. She said many law enforcement officers, for example, aren’t trained in the handling of the type of individual mental health crises that so often lead to misunderstanding and tragedy. Instead of focusing on punishment and retribution, the funding that currently subsidizes aggressive, often violent police forces – not to mention district attorneys who pile up sometimes unjust convictions by using victims as pawns and ignoring cultural nuances – must be allocated to more productive and enriching support programs that can prevent crime from ever happening.
She said that divestment in policing can be accompanied by reinvestment in other ways. “When we take away [funding for policing], where do we put it?” Odums Hebert posed. “Do we put it back in the community but also re-envision how our state and federal budgets have to conform to this new idea of deconstructing structural racism?
“We have to enact restorative justice practices,” she added, “so how do we have different agencies responding to our communities when they are in harm’s way?”
Dr. Mike McClanahan, president of the Louisiana NAACP, said that following the 2016 fatal shooting of Alton Sterling by police in Baton Rouge, McClanahan said that he and other grassroots advocates encouraged police to attend church services or undertake volunteer efforts within the neighborhoods they serve.
“Police need to blend into the community,” he said. “They should never stick out like a sore thumb. They should be embedded in the fabric of the community.”
Ashley Shelton, the executive director of the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, noted that throughout the rest of this year, elections at every level – parish, state and federal – will be a key opportunity for activists and allies to move their energy and efforts from street protests to actual, substantive change.
“It’s a chance for us to demand leadership that isn’t corrupt,” Shelton said, “to demand leadership that cares about Black and brown bodies, to demand leadership that actually wants to move our communities forward and not take away people’s quality of life.
“This is an opportunity to vote in leadership that’s going to use discretion to make good decisions that let people take their lives back, but also [to elect] folks that are willing to do the work of abolition, to defund that police and ultimately the liberation of Black and brown bodies,” Shelton continued.
Panelists spoke about numerous concrete, definitive actions that can be taken to reform law enforcement and the criminal justice system, including:
• Banning cash bail that favors the wealthy and punishes the poor;
• Establish an ability-to-pay system of court fees and fines that doesn’t reinforce and criminalize poverty;
• Abolishing qualified immunity that shields government officials from accountability and repercussion when they trample people’s rights;
• Establish a national standard for regulating, monitoring and preventing the use of force by police officers;
• Requiring adequate mental health crisis training for law enforcement;
• Removing a pervasive police presence from schools in which the student body is predominately Black and;
• Strengthening diversion programs and support services to help the formerly incarcerated avoid recidivism and a cycle of crime.
Many of these goals have been put forward or introduced in proposed legislation by several elected officials at various levels, including Congressman Cedric Richmond, D-New Orleans; Louisiana State Rep. Ted James, D-101st District; and New Orleans City Council President Jason Williams, all of who updated the panelists and the several thousands of citizens listening to the webinar about each of their recent legislative actions.
Richmond briefed listeners about the status of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which has been filed by Congresswoman Karen Bass, D-Calif., the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus.
Richmond said that as of the time of the Urban League webinar last Tuesday night, the act had 227 co-sponsors, more than enough to be adopted by the House of Representatives if and when it comes out of committee for a floor vote. The day after the webinar, Richmond was in Washington for the meeting of the House Judiciary Committee, which debated the Justice in Policing Act. The hearing included a heated, personally-pointed exchange between Richmond and Florida Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz.
Last Tuesday’s webinar also included input from James, who discussed a resolution he filed in the Statehouse several days earlier calling for a study of police reform in Louisiana. The resolution drew the ire of Republican legislators in a June 10 Statehouse session that led to an impassioned debate.
James told the webinar participants that the resolution is designed to study the state of law enforcement in Louisiana and identify problem areas that require attention and reform. “This is not an indictment of every police officer, because we know that every police officer is not bad,” James said. “But if we continue to ignore what’s happening in Black and brown communities at the hands of law-enforcement officers, then we are not doing our jobs here.”
Williams told the panelists about his proposal to create a citizens advisory committee to study the funding and efficiency of the city’s police forces, an idea that’s received pushback and skepticism from law enforcement and the District Attorney’s Office.
Two of the most powerful speakers from last week’s webinar were University of Louisiana-Lafayette student leader Adam Eugene and Karen “KG” Marshall, executive director of Rethink, a New Orleans youth advocacy and education organization. Eugene, who serves as the director of events for the ULL Black Student Union and president of the university’s Panhellenic Council, echoed many of the points made by earlier speakers, but he said the students he represents on campus also are pressing for stronger educational systems and funding.
“They want a future that’s invested in our education,” he said, placing the process of learning in the context of criminal justice reform. “They don’t want to have to simply fight for funding, they don’t want to have to fight to be educated, they don’t want to have to fight to be heard and recognized as human beings. It should be something that’s instilled and promised within the same creed that everyone else follows in this country – liberty and justice for all.”
Eugene also pointed to the problematic clause in the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution that seemingly allows for the incarcerated to essentially become enslaved to the government. He added that it’s up to young people, such as college students, to eradicate that clause.
Marshall placed the struggle for defunding and even abolishing police and authority-based units at every level – from local police to ICE to the country’s military stationed all over the world – as flowing from their origins as slave control methods for capitalistic ends.
Marshall said government policing is a symbol and mechanism for social and economic repression. She said that in the United States, “the police are really there to protect and serve the interests of profit and money.”
She added that negotiating and bargaining for just small, incremental progress “doesn’t actually change the systems. The bottom three-fourths of folks in terms of class, the people of color in the lower rungs never see real change, the people who are calling for the liberation of all,” Marshall said.
“We understand that in a white supremacist system, which the U.S. is, that has always meant freedom to restrict and the freedom from restriction,” Marshall added, “and we know that as we’re trying to dismantle all of that, we have a different definition of freedom. [That definition] means that those who occupy the lowest levels of the working class, the permanent underclass, are allowed to be free, and then everyone will be free. We need to push until that happens.”
This article originally published in the June 22, 2020 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
