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The purpose of the show is to provide a critical examination of society and culture through the intersectional lens of race, gender, and class, more specifically it seeks to provide a COUNTER-NARRATIVE. The Show encourages a reflective assessment and critique of unique standpoints and their potential contribution to popular discourse.
I need to know everything. Who in the what in the where? I need everything. Trust me. I hear what you're saying, but allegiance. Know what you're telling me. I'm curious. George. I hop in the Porsche five and a horse. I'm ready for war. I'm coming for throws eternal ghosts. I need to know everything.
Hello and welcome to the counter narrative show. I am your host, Rasheem, and today our topic is defunding the police. We are joined with special guests, a very special guest, Caitlin Selman. She is an assistant professor of criminology at Framingham State University and a member of defund WPD. Her research and community engagement focuses on youth justice, abolitionist organizing and abolitionist organizing with her most recent publications appearing in academic journals such as contemporary justice review, six o'clock, critical criminology and youth justice. Thank you so much for coming on the counter narrative show. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. So I'd like to hear a little bit more about how did you come to this work, like, how did you get started?
I'm gonna pause actually, still not still not live.
This thing is so tricky because it actually is telling me that it is. So I'm going to end. Nope, I don't want to end the meeting. I am really
think about if they're actually doing what they claim to be doing, or if they're just kind of tinkering at the edges of an existing structure and actually reinforcing that structure, and kind of a covert, sneaky way so, so I kind of started paying attention to that, particularly in schools and school punishment, and focusing on stuff, you know, kind of around the school to prison pipeline, and then the disciplinary alternative school, which was a reform that emerged in response to some of the critique of the school to prison pipeline. And once you kind of start paying attention to that stuff, you get really bogged down with how horrifying everything and how you know things that say that they're going to be great end up not being great and just end up being really problematic. And I was really looking for some hope and a way forward. And I had some really great mentors who basically shoved abolitionist literature in my face and were like, Here, read this, write your dissertation conclusion on this. I was like, Okay. And so I read that. And then, you know, I was exposed to people like mariame PABA and Angela Davis and Cedric Robinson and so many others. And I think once you once you dive into that, you don't come back, which is great, and is such a gift. So that's kind of how I got here. Awesome.
You mentioned that you kind of started with that you were kind of a reformer, and it seemed like that that wasn't quite enough. Can you talk to folks about the difference between police reform, police abolition and defunding police?
Yeah, so reform tends to be a little bit more palatable. I think reform is really a way for us to maintain the same structure. So in this context, it would be policing, right? So it's a way for us to keep the police, but just to edit it and alter it a little bit, maybe make it a little nicer, make it a little gentler, make it a little more equitable, whatever that looks like with policing. And but still have the police. And so it's often a lot easier for people who for for people for whom, I guess the police have always been meant to protect, particularly white people, right? It's a lot easier for us to imagine changing the police a little bit, but, but not to fathom getting rid of them, right? It's like this wild thing. This was absolutely wild suggestion, like it's it's laughable at best and unimaginable at worst, I think. But reform kind of makes sense, because a lot of people can't deny that we have a lot of issues with policing. We've had a lot of issues with policing, and so reform sounds like this very plausible thing that we can do, thing that we can do in the short term. We don't have to wait decades, or however long for that to come now with reform. Reform is the goal, right? The goal is simply to reform. And there are steps that we can use to get there with abolition, the goal is to abolish. Reform is one of many, many, many, many, many tactics that we can use to get to abolition. So reform, kind of non reformist, reforms, things that don't bolster this system, things that actually run in direct contrast to the system, but that can still allow us to have incremental change, are very much in alignment with abolition. And defunding is one of those things, right? So. So defunding can be a reform. Defunding can also be a step towards abolition, and it kind of depends on what your end goal is. So for me, defunding is just one of many steps that we take to get to Du Bois's abolition, democracy, right? Like this is just one thing that we need to do. We need to do so many other things. And of course, that's uncomfortable and complex and very long term and requires a lot of imagination, which I think is why there's often so much pushback. But those are kind of the different things. So with abolition like the goal is eventually to have a world where we don't need the police, where we don't even think that we need the police where we have actually thought our way out of this idea that the police are here to keep us safe, because, as we've seen, the police are not here to keep everyone safe. Policing has never been about keeping everyone safe and equally safe and keeping everyone happy and healthy. So it kind of depends on on what you want. You know, if you know, if you still want to have the police around and kind of tinker with it, then that's reform. But if you want to have a world where we've built up community structures of accountability, and we have people we can call on for safety, and we have these kind of alternative structures in place, and where we've built up institutions that do promote safety so much that we don't have as much harm and violence as we have right now, then that's kind of the abolitionist goal.
Okay, um, you mentioned a bit about you know, one of the things in which sometimes people see around with the police is they're supposed to be here to keep us safe, but they're not actually keeping us safe. Can you share some of your insights on the current role of punishment, imprisonment and policing in our current society? What is their active role, not what their ideal? You could share a bit about both, a bit about what their ideal of what it should be, and then also, what is the current role right now, of punishment, imprisonment and policing? Yeah.
So I think in terms of kind of the ideal, because I think this is important, right, police and and prisons, or various forms of imprisonment and punishment are ideally there to keep everyone safe, to kind of keep people in line, to deter people from behaving badly, whatever that means, and, you know, to make sure that, you know, we're kind of living up to this ideal of safety, that's what they're kind of supposed to be there for, right? It's like we have prisons, because it's supposed to be, you know, if you don't want to end up in prison, then don't break the law, right? So it's a role to deter you. We have the police so that if you see a police officer you know driving behind you, you're going to slam on your brakes so you're not speeding anymore if you were speeding at all, right? It's like these it's this kind of control to keep you to follow the rules, because these rules or these laws are supposedly put in place because they reflect the interests of the common good, right? That they're supposed to keep everyone safe. Now that doesn't really work in practice, right? That's in theory. But in practice, what we see is that various forms of punishment, whether that's just different forms of exclusion, different forms of isolation, whether that's punishment in schools, punishment, you know, kind of out in the world, whatever it is, right, punishment and policing and imprisonment, at least, what I've come to find, and I'm just drawing on a bunch of really brilliant people who know way more about this than I do, but really, what their function is is to maintain an unequal social order. Right? We have an unequal social order. We have people on the bottom so that we can have people on the top. Have people on the top. If you want to have people on the top, you have to have people on the bottom, and these institutions and these strategies actually work to reinforce that order. Right? This is an order that was built and continues to be built on the backs of marginalized people, and it's maintained through oppression and exploitation and erasure and enclosure and isolation and all these kind of horrifying experiences. So what we see is that policing and imprisonment and punishment are some of the kind of strategies that allow those forces to work, and we see those things kind of proliferating throughout those institutions. And so it's not, it's not a coincidence. You know this system like, you'll hear it right, like this system isn't broken. It's actually doing exactly what it was designed to do, right? Prisons aren't broken. They were designed to effectively control what have been called the dangerous classes, right, marginalized people. Policing was designed to protect property right, to protect whiteness. So these things aren't misfiring, right? You know, they're not just broken. We don't need to just, like, pull over and kind of, you know, fix the wheel. This is exactly how they were designed to work. So they're actually working quite well. Well,
yeah, thanks for sharing that. I want to first say hello to Jerome Chester, as well as to Felicia and to the 12 folks who are currently tuning in. Feel free to share this out on other platforms, in your groups, you mentioned how it's working quite well. It's working as it was designed, and it's one of the aspects of it is it's designed to protect whiteness. Also in your work, I know you talk a bit about the carceral state. You share a little bit with our listeners, what exactly is the carceral state and how does that play out?
Yeah, yeah. So I'll get, I'll give, kind of the long definition, only because I was really proud of it and I worked really hard on it my dissertation. So I'll give the long definition, and then I'll kind of break it down. So in my dissertation, I define the carceral state as a vast apparatus of punishment and control consisting of a variety of institutions and mechanisms that work both overtly and covertly through exclusion and oppression to produce and maintain a steady stream of marginalized bodies necessary for the racial capitalist order. So I think that's like an 80 word sentence, but essentially it's, it's so much. The carceral state is so much. I mean, it's anything and everything you can think of that requires and uses exclusion and oppression and violence and harm to maintain that unequal order, right to ensure that there are people at the bottom, and those people are most often, You know, black, brown, indigenous, poor, working class, queer, disabled people, right? This is our marginalized populations. And so I think the thing that's important to know about the carceral state is that oftentimes, when we think about carceral the word that gets linked to that is incarceration, right? Or imprisonment, and prisons and jails are those overt forms of kind of carcerality that we tend to think about. But the carceral state also works very overtly and very sneakily. It works through things that claim to be reforms. It works through things like the disciplinary alternative school. It works through things like drug courts that were supposed to be alternatives, right? It works through things like electronic monitoring that have been touted as, you know, kind of the solution to mass incarceration, like, well, let's not put people in prison. Let's just slap an ankle monitor on them. And isn't this great? They're free out in the community, and they can go live in their homes and work, and they can do all of this. And, you know, we're not the incarceration capital of the world anymore, because we have all these people on ankle monitors, right, as if this is something great. So that's what I think is so important, is that, you know, the carceral state, it's not just prisons and jails. It's so much more, and that's why we have to be very careful about reforms and about things that claim to be these benevolent advances on these really harmful things that we've done, because when we look really closely at them, we see that things like electronic monitoring, things like disciplinary alternative schools, are incredibly exclusionary, incredibly punitive, incredibly isolating, right? But, but they kind of get protected from that, because they seem like something better,
like just basically putting a different spin on the same thing. Like, it's not necessarily there in prison, but you still have this level of like punishment and confinement, exactly speaking, of like things around punishment. And then you brought you also mentioned school, can you tell us a little bit about your work around punishment as pedagogy? I feel like I like, even when just reading that, it resonated with me, and it's like, oh my gosh, we totally have a mentality of punishment as pedagogy. Parents do school systems do overall like, there is this, there is this punishment as pedagogy. Can you talk a little bit more about that and your work around it?
Yeah, so I kind of came up with that idea as I was working on my dissertation. And so my dissertation really focused on one example of what I'll refer to as a reformist reform, right? So a reform that very much did just kind of like Tinker at the edges of the system. So that was the disciplinary alternative school. So for anyone familiar with like, school to prison pipeline stuff, or just even anyone who maybe had a kid who has been suspended or expelled, I mean, this impacts at different levels. But in the 1990s we really saw suspensions and expulsions skyrocket thanks to like zero tolerance policies and this myth of the juvenile super predator and all of these kind of ideological mechanisms that were taking place. There were a lot of issues with students being suspended or expelled, right like teachers and parents and administrators and even. Policymakers were really concerned that kids were being pushed out of school like they were losing educational time. One of the big concerns too is that they were being pushed out into unsupervised spaces and like out causing trouble because they weren't in school anymore. So in response to a lot of those critiques, there was a big push to reform, right to respond to this like, yes, we know that the school to prison pipeline is problematic. We know it's really bad to kick kids out of school. So what can we do to kind of fix that problem? And the disciplinary alternative school emerged in response. The thing about the disciplinary alternative school is it was a reform. It wasn't a transformation. These schools, they vary by state. It's hard to get really solid data about them, but they tend to operate like mini prisons. These are schools where kids who maybe previously would have been suspended or expelled, they're not pushed out of school, they're pushed out of their school, and they're put in another space with all of the other kids who were also kicked out of school. And these schools are often really underfunded, really understaffed. I mean, a lot of the problems that we see public schools today facing are compounded and exacerbated in these schools. They're also very kind of criminalizing spaces. So in some schools, kids have to walk with their hands behind their backs, or they have to put their hand on the wall when they walk down the hallway. Tons of surveillance cameras, drug sniffing dogs. Some of the juvenile probation officers have their offices there, right so they're just like right there by the population that they're most likely going to be interacting with so these are not great spaces. And what we saw with this, of course, is this reformist approach. Instead of dealing with the simple fact that when kids are misbehaving, whatever that means, we should not be responding to them with punishment. We should be trying to figure out why they're misbehaving. What's going on? Maybe they're talking back. Maybe they fell asleep in class. Well, why did they fall asleep in class? Maybe there's some stuff going on at home. They need support with, right all of these questions that we could ask if we were able to, if we had the resources to, we're not getting asked instead, these behaviors that were probably the result of larger structural conditions are being punished over and over and over again. Kids are being punished for these things that are often out of their control. So we were doing that with suspensions and expulsions, and then we continued to do that with the disciplinary alternative school, again by kind of removing them, but the alternative school was again posed as this benevolent reform, because, hey, we're not kicking them out of school anymore. They still get to go to school, and they're still getting an education. It's a subpar education, and the teachers are severely overworked, and, you know, it's a mess, but we're doing so much better. So this this focus on punishment, instead of caring for kids instead of actually empowering them and teaching them and helping them to become like creative, critical people, we just punish them, and we continue to do that. So we haven't really seen that change.
And it's like it reminds me of what you see in your work about the ways in which alternative schools prepare you for a life of imprisonment with this whole walking through the halls behind your hand, it's like you you're socializing them into into being, being and believing that they themselves are criminals. Um, I want to say Felicia McConnell said, Thanks, Caitlin, great explanation, explanation of the system of policing, prisons and punishment, ASC division of critical criminology and Social Justice says, talk to us about the role of privatization in the carceral state, state and Felicia says, again, doing what they were designed to do. I want to take a moment before you get into that again. Thanks to our listeners. Please feel free to definitely share this out. As we were talking about defunding the police, one of the things that that, I think it should be very clear, is that defunding the police is, is that this end of the rainbow of the journey of the spectrum. But there are, there are things that that lead up to a better understanding of that, just understanding the terms, understanding society, understanding the structures at play, and then how we get to defunding the police. I want us to definitely take a deeper dive. We're going to get into the meat and heart of defunding the police, but it's very important to understand the conditions around this carceral state that we're currently in. So, Caitlin, you can go ahead and answer the question, talk to us about the role of privatization in this in the carceral state.
Yeah. So I think you know, particularly if you talk about, like, private prisons. So private prisons. Prisons have become a major point of critique, because, you know, our our kind of state and federal prisons are, are already nightmares there. They're not good places. Private prisons operate in kind of a shadow system. There aren't a ton of regulations that private prisons have to follow, not that our state and federal prisons really have to follow those either, but there's at least kind of a suggestion that they do. Private prisons are also even more overtly linked to, like a financial imperative, right? There's, there's literally a financial imperative to fill private prisons these you know, these prisons are often linked with businesses and corporations. People who sit on boards for banks also sit on boards for these prisons. And so there's often a lot of interconnection between prison and industry, right, like the prison industrial complex. So, so those things exist in our regular prison and jail systems and then, but again, they're kind of amplified with private prisons. So private prisons play a very significant role in reproducing the carceral state. And I think what's interesting is that we've really seen people kind of picking up on private prisons as kind of one point of critique. It's actually become pretty, a pretty good talking point that we need to abolish private prisons, and then that's one step towards perhaps abolishing prisons later on down the line. But you know, this is the thing about reforms. You got to keep pushing. We can't just say yes, we understand that private prisons are horrible places. Let's get rid of private prisons. We have to say yes, private prisons are horrible places. We need to get rid of them. But also, state and federal prisons are horrible places, and we need to deal with that as well, right? So we can't just stop at that point. And I think that's often what happens is, when we get caught up on one point, we stop pushing a lot of times, because people are burnt out. You know, it also requires a lot of imagination and a lot of thinking, and in a precarious social and economic climate, like, who really has the time to do that work? It's, it's hard work, but I think it is really important to think about so private prisons, yes, super problematic. Also, regular prisons, super problematic.
Yeah. Aubrey Bridget Burgess says, Your definition, of course, the carceral state and how you speak to punishment as pedagogy is right on point. Another person says, Do you have any concerns that if we defund police, will open the door to privatize police? Before you answer that question, though, I want just go ahead and start getting into the whole defunding the police aspect. And I want to, I want to start with the conversation around, what can you tell us in your work that you have learned around the origin of police and punishment?
Yeah, so, you know, policing doesn't have the best origin, and I think it's really, really important that we understand the roots of policing there. This is a very complex history, and I will not do it justice, but I will try. There are lots of people out there who have done great work around this, but some of the things that really stand out to me when I think about the history of policing, deal with the role that policing as an institution has played in, as I said earlier, protecting property, right? So if we think about the kind of informal forms that policing has taken and the formalized forms that policing has taken, it's always oriented around protecting property in some form, right? So we had night watches that were kind of these informal groups of volunteers who were supposed to kind of patrol around town and kind of make sure everyone was was in line. They were not very reliable. It was kind of said they were just local volunteers who were doing this. It was kind of a mess. But then we saw kind of pushes, especially in the north, particularly New England, to formalize police forces. So the first publicly funded, organized police force was actually in Boston in 1838 so Framingham State is right outside of Boston, so I think this is important context, but they were basically tasked with protecting merchandise that was coming into the ports. Right there was so much, so much more merchandise coming in, and the merchants around were really worried that their property was going to get stolen or damaged, and so they wanted kind of a group of people tasked with protecting that property. What certain scholars of policing have argued is that those merchants didn't want to pay for that force on their own. Yeah, because who wants to do that? So they did a lot of ideological work to convince people that this force wouldn't just protect the property but also protect people, right? Like this is actually for your common good. We need to have this organized force that can keep everyone safe, plus my merchandise, right? So, but really, there they were tasked with protecting property. Now, when we think even kind of more overtly about the really problematic history of policing, we of course, get to the slave patrols, right? So, so policing is distinctly, is distinctly related to the slave patrols. I mean, in a lot of states, the slave patrols literally became the police force. So again, these slave patrols were tasked with protecting property. Right now, at that time, property, they were people, right, but not seen as people, as property, as as a way to protect whiteness, right, to protect the white people and their property. So we can't deny that policing doesn't have the best history. And you know, you got to look at the roots. You got to look at the roots of an institution, because if you don't contend with that, there is no way forward. And there's been so much denial, I think, around the very racist and classist roots of policing that it really does inhibit any type of productive conversation around a way forward. Because, you know, it's not that, you know, if it's not a few bad apples, like the roots of the tree are actually rotten, and they have been. So I think understanding that history is really, really important, and that's what a lot of people who are talking about defunding or talking about abolishing are calling on, because they're looking at history right. History teaches us a lot.
Thank you for that. Um, you're adjusting it in you are watching the counter narrative show. Our topic today is defunding the police. We're talking you typically go by like Professor Caitlin Selman. I
can just go by Caitlin
today, with Caitlin around defunding the police. So with that, with that history, with the knowledge of that history that focuses on protecting whiteness, protecting property kind of a caveat, sort of slipping in, maybe protecting people, but primarily my property, then also it's connected, connection with slave patrols in terms of policing today, what is the definition? Can you frame for us over policing? And can you frame for us also under policing? Yeah.
So I think, you know, if we think about over policing, we're thinking about kind of a pattern of of kind of police presence, police interaction, police engagement. So if we think about what happens in schools, right, where kids are sometimes suspended, sometimes expelled, sometimes referred to disciplinary alternative schools, sometimes arrested in schools for very minor misbehavior, like willful defiance or, you know, so there were a couple years ago. I mean, there were so many instances of like a kid chewed a pop tart into shape of a gun and got arrested, I think, like a girl wrote her wrote, I love my friends on her desk and erasable marker, and was handcuffed and thrown over a cop car and taken down to the station. I think she was like, 13, totally micron on that, but like she was a child, and those are the kind of the instances of over policing, right? We're like, over policing. People were taking things that are not inherently dangerous or violent or cause harm to people, and we're making those things criminal. And this doesn't just happen to everyone, like this is everyone doesn't experience this over policing equally. Particular communities experience over policing far more than others, right? So there's kind of a double layer. It's like their actions are over, certain actions are over policed, and then certain communities are over policed for those actions. So we see things like just literal police presence in low income communities and in communities of color, where there tend to be far more police officers that are kind of stationed in those communities, right, like, that's kind of the most literal form of over policing that we have, like actual police presence. And what that tends to do is increase the likelihood that someone either gets caught doing something that is illegal or is simply interpreted as doing something illegal. And this is what we see so so often. I mean, yeah, if you have a police officer follow me for 200 miles on the expressway, I'm probably going to get pulled over for speeding, because I'm probably going to speed at some point right right now, the The hope is just that, like, while I'm speeding, there isn't a police officer there, so, so we have that over. Policing, right? And then we have this under policing that I think can take on a couple of different meanings, kind of the opposite, where there are certain communities that are under policed, right, like they have less of a police presence, but then there are also, generally the communities that are over policed that also don't get to benefit from any of the potentially positive things that police could provide. So communities that are over policed are also often under policed because when they call 911, or when there is real harm that occurs in their community, they then can't rely on the police to help them, because the police either aren't going to be there, or there's also the risk that, you know, if I call the police like, I'm actually going to be the one that gets shot. So it has multiple meanings depending on the context. And that's what I think is so hard to understand about the issues around policing. There are so many. There are just so many, and they're so tangled,
yeah, especially that piece that's so complicated to have police in the space where it sounds like they are over policing like these non violent minor offenses, but under policing things that are like actually doing people bodily, physical harm. Yeah, absolutely, that's that's interesting to say the least, to put it mildly, um, Ty Coleman says, it's not a few, I think, um, he's quoting you. It's not a few bad apples. The roots of the tree are rotten. Aubrey Burgess says, and we never hear of the roots of the tree. Putting that info out front is imperative to understanding, to an understanding of the defund the police movement. Thank you for shedding light on this. Felicia says, right, the Officer Friendly no longer exists. Asia says that part, not sure what that part was, but I'm sure it was when you were saying something interesting and amazing. Ty also says, or the police simply don't have, don't believe that you're a victim because of who you are, is the thing really, definitely comes up, and then it's like, like you said before Caitlin, like, am I going to call the police? And you know, knowing that I actually might be the person who actually end up in jail or what have you, or or even shot or lose my life? Um, we talked a bit about the role of the police, and you shared with us earlier about the differences between defunding, abolishing and reforming. I really want to get deeper into defunding the police, and I want to get into what are some of the connections that folks are making with ways forward of realizing that and what exactly, a little bit more does it mean to defund the police? Because I think some people hear it, it's just like no police take all of their money. I think about abolition is probably more along those lines, but I think the funding sounds to me a bit more like reallocation to other services. Can you talk just go a little bit deeper about what it means to defund and kind of like tap into folks imagination of what that could potentially look like? Yeah.
So there has been a lot of debate over you know, what does defunding actually mean? You know, some have argued that it just simply means like shrinking the police budgets a little bit right, like taking some of their money away and reallocating it, as you mentioned, others argue that, you know, it might mean kind of scaling back the responsibilities of the police. So there have been a lot of calls to ensure you know that police don't know that police no longer respond to certain types of calls that we send, like social workers or mental health workers, you know, or what have you, that police no longer have that responsibility. Others have actually kind of used this call for defunding to put forth more of a reformist agenda where they actually call for more money to fund things like body cams, which is something I can talk about. So for me, right? For me personally, defunding the police is exactly what it sounds like. It does indeed mean defunding the police. It literally does mean taking their money, but it means so much more than that, and this is where I think the conversation tends to kind of end, right? So because I'm an abolitionist, I see defunding as a means to a particular end, kind of as I talked about earlier, right the end, being down the line a world without police and prisons and rent and low quality and unaffordable health care and underfunded schools and basically racial capitalism, right where we see an end to that. Shrinking police budgets on its own isn't really transformative or liberatory. It has the potential to be, but we have to push a little bit more, because simply shrinking the police budgets is not going to ensure. Ensure that black, brown, indigenous, queer, disabled, working class and poor people are no longer at risk of the violence of the police, right? This is not the only thing that we can do. Like defunding the police is not going to ensure that those things don't happen anymore, and if that's what we want, then we have to to push further. So defunding moves us one step closer to that world. But it's not the only thing, and it can't be the only thing we have to keep pushing. So defunding essentially means, you know, in kind of short term ideas, rejecting outright budget increases. So that's something that defund Worcester. PD, that's what we were kind of fighting against. Was a 200 I think, $254,000 budget increase that we unfortunately didn't fight off, apparently. But you know, it means rejecting those outright budget increases. It means rejecting the absurd overtime budgets that police departments often have. It means rejecting the sneaky increases that we'll see in things like body cams and implicit bias training, all of these reforms right? And at least for abolitionists, it eventually means operating without the police. And I think this is where, you know, I'm seeing a lot of things on the internet where people are like, no, no. Defunding the police does not mean that we're not going to have the police anymore. Calm down. It's okay, like it does. I mean, for some right for, I think what we're seeing, you know, for a lot of the kind of the people leading defund campaigns across the nation, they're not just arguing for defunding the police, they're arguing for an investment, taking that money from the police and putting it into schools and public health initiatives and libraries and all of these amazing institutions that we have so that we can prevent the harm and violence That makes us believe we need the police so that we no longer think that we need the police, so that we no longer have the police. So it's kind of a long term thing. But yeah, I mean, for me, like defunding definitely does mean defunding,
yeah, I think one of the things that speaking to you, I feel like in just like recent studies and looking into things is the ways in which some of the reforms actually does increase the budget. Body cams means they need more money. Bias training means they get more money. You know, there's so many things around like all of those. The alt reforms mean increasing the police budget. Defunding means decreasing and allocating it, and then the abolition is the move toward, like, no more police, possibly, you know, like, How can we live in a world where and I think that's one of the biggest challenges around tapping into the imagination of, How can we live in a world without police, I think here's a question in some of your work, has the term, have you heard the term restorative justice, and how does it come up and play out in this, in this sort of defund the police movement?
Yeah, so, so the first time I came across restorative justice, because my research really focused on schools that was kind of like ground zero for restorative justice, right? So restorative justice is supposed to be this kind of alternative approach, you know, to traditional forms of punishment. Sometimes it involves, like healing circles or in schools like peer juries, things to bypass, I guess, alternatives to like suspension and expulsion, right? Um, within the context of the school, you know, the research on restorative justice is kind of mixed. There have been a lot of students of school districts who have implemented restorative justice and have been like, yes, absolutely, we like this so much more than being suspended or expelled. Let's please keep this but in terms of you know what restorative justice actually does, it's, it's very reformist, if you think about it, even in the name restorative justice, right? It's about restoring previous conditions. Now the counter to that. And what I see more, what I'm kind of hearing more about, which I think is amazing, particularly in terms of defunding the police, is transformative justice. Right? Where, with restorative justice, you want to restore previous conditions. With transformative justice, you want to transform the forces that made those conditions in the first place. So if we think about why someone hurt someone else, we're not just trying to allow those two people to kind of exist in the same space again. That would be kind of restoring it, right? We actually want to understand why that harm took place in the first. Place on an individual level, on a community level and on an institutional level, we want to help the person who was harmed heal from that harm. We want to help the person who caused the harm heal from harm that they had also potentially experienced prior to this. And we will also want to change the conditions in the community and in the institutions that made that harm possible in the first place. And so that's a lot of work. Transformative justice requires transforming our education system, transforming our healthcare transforming like, probably even just actually straight up, abolishing capitalism, like if we're gonna go that far, transforming our understandings of community, transforming how we relate to each other, so that we can build up alternative structures of accountability and safety that don't rely on just restoring previous conditions that actually transform the conditions we live in right now and that you know, people after us will live in so that those things don't happen again, or they're at least significantly, significantly less likely to happen
again, ASC division of critical criminology commented and The new Trump plan actually gives them more money. Ty commented, yes, reform just increased the police budget, and we already have reforms that police do not honor. For example, chokeholds have been illegal in most jurisdictions. Gary Mullen and the Baltimore City Police budget is 550 million Felicia as transforming all of it to exclamation points in red, I might add, Felicia also says the police department needs a gut job, a good job, yeah. What are some of the biggest misconceptions would you say about defunding the police what it is and what it means. What do people get wrong about it? Yeah,
so I think, I think there are a couple of things. Well, I think there are two main things, and I think these are obviously intertwined. Um, so I think the first thing is that it's only about defunding the police, that it's simply about taking the police department's money. Um, because it also deals with reinvesting that money in the community, right? Reallocating those resources to institutions and initiatives that do promote community cohesion and safety and health, right? So it's not just about taking the money, it's also about putting it into things that have been proven to decrease the likelihood of harm and violence occurring in the first place, right? So it's about preventing harm and violence, whereas policing has historically, and of course today, also been primarily about reacting. It's been a very reactionary institution. And so if our goal is actually to stop people from being harmed, then we need to prevent it in the first place. And so part of defunding is like taking that money and putting it into things that will actually keep that from happening in the first place. So I think that also links with another major misconception, and this, I love this one, is that people fighting for defunding want a world without accountability, that we're totally okay, right? We're like, totally fine with people not being safe, with people punching each other and killing each other. And you know that we just want, like, harm and violence to dominate, right? Which it already does, but that's not true at all. Right? We want to defund because it opens up money, but it also opens up time and energy and creativity that we can devote to strengthening schools and public health and housing and, you know, employment support and mental health support, right? Everything that makes for strong communities that can actually prevent harm and violence from occurring. So no, we don't want people just to be able to run around willy nilly like the purge and you know, yes, this is going to be fantastic. No, that's not what we want. We legitimately want people to be happy and healthy and safe, but we recognize that policing does not allow that to occur. Policing is not the way to go with that. We need to build up these other forms of community accountability, things that actually heal harm and actually prevent harm, right, and that actually transform conditions in which harm occurs. And again, like, I mean, this is, this is nothing that I'm coming up with. I'm following amazing people, one of those being Miriam Kaba, and she often gets the question, like, without the police, how would we keep how would we keep people safe, right? How would we not just let it be the purge? And I love her answer, because she always said. Like we know. What I ask is, what are we doing right now to keep us safe, and is that working? No, we rely on policing in prisons, ideologically and imaginatively, to keep us safe, knowing full well that it does not keep everyone safe, right? It's a very privileged position to think that, like, policing keeps everyone safe, because that likely means that you've never been under threat by the police, right? So, so we have to build up these other systems of accountability and like, the nice thing is, people are already doing this. People have been doing this for decades. This is not anything new, it just doesn't get a lot of play in the mainstream media. I mean, mutual aid networks are blowing up right now, like people are cooking for each other. They're taking care of each other's kids, they're putting out fires, they're providing medical support in the streets, like they're housing people. They're doing all of these things. They're keeping each other safe without the police. So these things aren't impossible. We just have to imagine that they are possible. We have to recognize that they are possible. And I think that that's a huge thing that gets lost when people say, Oh, you want to defund the police. Oh, okay, you just want, like, pure chaos.
Yeah, I think, no, I think that's such a that's such a important point. Important point when we talk about one of the first steps towards being able to do something like defunding or whether we abolish police, is changing the shifting the paradigm in our minds, thing that changing this idea that without one, without police, that everyone would go crazy and be like the purge, and also just realizing the the areas wherein people are over police, where we're calling in police and police doesn't don't need to be there, or decriminalizing some things like minor drug use, Sex work. Just so many areas where we could just, like, really decriminalize some of these spaces and bring in some other forces, I think, is a big thing Asia. Maxson says things that heal harm. This needs to be the focus for the next generation, at least. And I totally agree. She also asked the question, which I think is a really good one to have towards the end. And it's a two part question. She says, what can the average citizen who is concerned about these issues do? That's the first one. And the second one is, what is a logical next step after the protests and calling attention to the need for reforming or defunding? How do we keep the momentum momentum? So, what can average citizens do? Who's concerned, and what is the logical next step to after we're done protesting? What is next?
Yeah, so, so I think the average citizen who's concerned. I mean, I think there are a ton of things that can be done. You know, even simple things, just like, I don't know, taking some time to like, think about what a world where everyone is safe might look like and like, just imagine it, right? I mean, this is like, I have my students do this. This is such an imaginative project because we have been so so many of us have been socialized into believing that police and prisons keep us safe, and we have to imagine our ways out of that. And so I think the first step is like sitting with what that world could look like and comparing that to what our world looks like right now, and then planning from there. So once you've kind of come up with this, you can look into like supporting local bail funds. I mean, that's a huge thing. Bail funds need so much support right now because people are out protesting, right and they're getting arrested, and they need support. So if you can, if you have the financial capital, donate to local bail funds. Or if you don't have the financial capital, look and contact them and see if there's anything else that they might need, like they might need white bodies to come and put themselves in front of people in these protests. They might need people to come take care of kids while they're protesting. Right? They might need these different forms of mutual aid. And if you can give in that way, I think it's fantastic. Reading, listening to podcasts is super I mean, all this stuff is getting so much attention right now. There's so many different articles and podcasts and and YouTube or Facebook Live videos going on right now where you can learn all this, and kind of getting some education on that, I think, is also really key, and also seeing if there are any defund campaigns that are taking place in your neighborhood, and if they're not, the movement for black lives actually just came out with an amazing defund toolkit. And so if you have the capacity to start a campaign, they have laid out all of these amazing steps for doing that. So I think there are a lot of different ways. And. Yeah, you know, a lot of it's ideological, like some of its physical, some of its financial, and a lot of it is imaginative as well. And just thinking through these things, because we need to do this, this emotional, imaginative work, to get ourselves out of this mess. I think I
agree it's definitely going to take several points of entry. And I really think that that aspect of like being more imaginative, imaginative, uh, cannot be overstated. Um, because I feel like I'm a fan of speculative fiction. And I feel like one of the reasons that I am a fan of speculative fiction is that there's this exploration of imagining a world beyond where it is. I know, you know, a lot of times with Afrofuturism, does this Octavia Butler has a lot of books that are just, I feel like, are just like so coming to life right now? Yeah, our real life experiences. What are before we close out, what are some of the things that you mentioned a resource, I think you said lie. What did you say? The movement for black lives? The movement for black lives as a toolkit? Yes. So folks want to jump on that podcast. Could you recommend one or two? Yes.
So call, call your girlfriend. Just did an episode with Miriam Kaba. Anything with Miriam Kaba is going to be amazing. Season of the bitch also just did one about abolition and defunding. So those are two really good ones. They're kind of like intro, kind of introducing you to these ideas, which I think is really important. Okay, those
are awesome and very helpful. And what is the organization that you're connected with that you're a member of defund DPW initiative? Oh, say it again. Defund WPD. WPD. Thank you. What are some of the initiatives that you guys are working on? Yeah,
so, so we had to mobilize very quickly, because the city budget was getting voted on very quickly, and so we all just kind of came together and mobilized around that. And so now, unfortunately, because they passed the budget, we have a lot of time to do some more long term strategizing. And right now we're working on connecting with bipoc organizers in Worcester, and kind of finding ways to center and support their work. And we're also developing our long term vision, because we're dealing with a lot of the same questions that everyone else is right, like, what do we want in the long term, and how do we get there? Because this is a long term struggle. This is not something that's going to be done very quickly, so we're kind of focusing on some other proposals that have been made in the city around like body cams and civilian review boards, and kind of strategizing around that and figuring out, you know, where we should kind of what we should be supporting and what we should be fighting against. So yeah, so we're working on a lot
that is a lot of work. Felicia says, great question. Good point. Childcare for protesters. Felicia also quoted you, emotional, imaginative work that is so true. Asia says, Yay. Speculative fiction, exactly for for you, you write on a lot around criminalization, your your professor at an institution that deals a lot with criminality and specifically youth, where can people read up on some of your work, find you? Could you share that? What's the best way to reach you around this stuff?
Yeah, so, I mean, I'm very reachable, like on Facebook, it's just my name. So you can find me on Facebook. My academic work is located in academic. You can mostly find links to it in academia, Edu. So if you visit academia.edu and you search my name, and I can actually put the link in the comments, because I have all that and yeah, so you can, let's see, I'm going to put these here so you can see the links to my articles and that, yeah, I'm really, I love to talk to people about this stuff. It's again, as I was telling you earlier, like, this is one of the few times where I felt like, you know this, this education that I got is actually contributing to something, you know, outside of the classroom, which is very powerful work anyway, but, but I would love to talk about this stuff. So if anyone has questions, they can reach out to me on Facebook or on Instagram. My I guess handle is KJ, underscore, cell SEL, yeah, and I'm open to talking to anyone
awesome. So Caitlin has put her some of her articles, or, yeah, some or access to an article in the chat. So feel free to look into that. I saw that you had, like a few others, so once you look into that, you'll probably see a lot more on Google Scholar. Right? Has more reasons why art will save us at 1,000% free. Thank you so much for everyone who tuned in, everyone who shared a comment and just engage in the conversation. Caitlin, thank you so much for being here and sharing your insight. Yeah.
Thank you so much. I This was great. This was a lot of fun. So I'm excited to have more conversations like this.
Awesome. I look forward to having you on the show again, and I am going to, I'm sharing my screen. Stop sharing. I am Nope. Did it again? I'm trying to share a different screen. I'm gonna get it, I'm gonna get it, I'm gonna do it right way. Nope, didn't do it the right way. All right. Say love me. Thanks again for coming on. Really appreciate your time.
Have a good one. Yeah, thank you so much.
Thanks again, for everyone who tuned in. Next episode will be a seat at the table, and it will focus on the significance of having people of color on boards, on nonprofit boards. So the significance of having people of color on nonprofit boards, and the title will be a seat at the table. Good night, everybody. Until next time this has been a counter narrative.
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