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The summer of 2020 was the largest protest movement for civil rights and racial justice in a generation. As Americans flooded the streets demanding justice and accountability for police brutality, police departments responded with force. By October 2020, five months after the murder of George Floyd, nearly 1,000 instances of police brutality were recorded to have happened during BLM protests.
Increasing police budgets and officer presence help create the very conditions that breed violence in the first place.
In August 2020, I was tackled and arrested during a Black Lives Matter protest in Portland, Oregon in August 2020. My husband was also arrested while exercising his rights, along with hundreds of other nonviolent protesters.
Less than a year later, my nephew’s father was killed by police in my hometown of Yuba City, California. Jose Flores was killed by a regional SWAT team on April 20, the day former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted for murdering George Floyd.
Flores did not pose an immediate threat to his family or police officers; he was alone in a house. Yet soon after a fully equipped SWAT team “subdued” him, he was pronounced dead. Now, his unborn child will never know his father and his young son will grow up without his father.
Flores is just one of more than 500 civilians in the U.S. killed by police during the first half of this year.
Media outlets across the country have been reporting on the rising rates of violent crime, with some calling it “bloody summer.” But closer examination of the data reveals the United States has actually been experiencing a historically low and decreasing trend of violent crime. Crimes including larceny, robbery and rape have actually gone down during the pandemic.
Rates of homicide have indeed risen, but there are many potential explainers for this, including the pandemic. What is clear is that it’s not due to a lack of police officers. In fact, increasing police budgets and officer presence help create the very conditions that breed violence in the first place. Incarceration breeds shame, isolation, economic deprivation and violence, all of which are primary drivers of violence outside of jails and prisons.
In addition to physical violence perpetrated by police officers against Black and brown people, constant police presence in these neighborhoods inflicts psychological violence. Public safety is more than just absence of direct, physical violence. Imagine living under constant patrol, where police officers are free to stop, search and detain you or your friends and family members for being too loud or acting suspicious, all in the name of public safety. People are afraid of the police.
The solution lies in getting rid of the police. Only by addressing the structural causes of violence in our communities and dispatching trained professionals without weapons can we truly make our communities safe. We must invest money into services for mental health, job creation, education, housing, and food security. Trained mental health workers, drug counselors, domestic violence crisis response teams and de-escalation professionals should act as first responders.
Jose’s children, and all the survivors of police brutality, will undoubtedly never feel safe with more officers on the streets. I do not feel safe with more police officers. I worry that my husband, who is Mexican, will be targeted by police because he looks out of place in the “white neighborhood” where my mother lives. I worry he’ll be pulled over and fatally shot by a police officer because he moved too slow or too fast to retrieve his license and registration.
This is not public safety.
This column was produced for The Progressive magazine and distributed through the Tribune News Service.