88: Defunding and Dismantling Police Departments and How You Can Support Ending Systemic Racism

In this episode, Matt Bowles contextualizes the U.S. movement to defund and dismantle police departments in the history of institutionalized white supremacy and police violence in the United States. 

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He talks about the consistency of police violence and repression of the Black community for hundreds of years without pause, from slavery to the convict-lease system to Jim Crow to the “war on drugs” and the explosion of prison-industrial-complex. He shares how the trend for the last 4 decades has been to cut social services, criminalize social problems, and expand the role of the police to handle them. He talks about the school-to-prison pipeline, the privatization of prisons, the financial incentives to keep people incarcerated, and the rise of mass incarceration. He also shares how the police have been increasingly militarized over the last few decades, receiving billions of dollars of military hardware from the Pentagon as well as training from the Israeli military. He then reviews the extensive attempts at “police reform” by the Minneapolis police department over the past 5 years and how they have all failed. He clarifies that policies of both Republican and Democratic Administrations have contributed to the problem. The movement currently underway is people taking matters into their own hands at the grassroots level and working with City Councils to defund police departments and re-allocate those resources back into communities of color, social services, education, and needs. And the commitment to dismantle the Minneapolis police department opens up opportunities to explore new models of public safety that can be used to build communities that, for the first time in American history, are safe for Black people. FULL SHOW NOTES AND DIRECT LINKS TO EVERYTHING DISCUSSED IS AVAILABLE HERE.

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