Issue 8: Defund SPD how much?
Our mission is to support each other and collaborate towards the abolition of policing and incarceration in our community. Read our organizing principles here. We publish every two weeks, on Tuesday mornings. Submissions welcome.
Black Lives Matter
We mourn the loss of Ma’khia Bryant, Andrew Brown Jr., and others who have been needlessly killed by the police in the last two weeks. Police violence will undoubtedly continue as long as we fund it with our public dollars.
Defund SPD how much?
Council Bill 119981
The fight over our public dollars is being waged right now in CM Herbold’s Public Safety and Human Services Committee. Will SPD be defunded by $2M, $5.4M, or more? Get up-to-speed with this short essay from Emma Lower and Peter Condit: For true public safety, we need accountability for SPD’s overtime spending (3 min read). An excerpt:
“SPD ended 2020 having spent $5.4M more on overtime than they were budgeted. Due to legal obligations, Council was forced to pay that difference from the general fund in December, but they simultaneously introduced legislation to remove an equivalent amount from the SPD’s 2021 budget. The action was meant to restore budget accountability and signal an end to the annual “blank check.” Moreover, the 2021 dollars taken from SPD would be transferred to a community-led process to address systemic causes of harm through participatory budgeting. Participatory budgeting centers the voices and needs of people most impacted by police violence and awards funding to programs that address housing, mental health, youth, economic, and nonviolent crisis and wellness needs.
Council’s resolve on the issue has recently wavered. On March 23, 2021, Councilmember Herbold, chair of the Public Safety and Human Services Committee, significantly amended the legislation to allow SPD to keep a majority of its overspending. Moreover, this bill allows SPD to receive up to $5 million in funding during the year to cover additional budget requests if they submit monthly staffing reports, hardly an equivalent to the firm stance of refusing to fund overtime spending.”
We must pressure city council to amend CB 119981 to restore it to its original intent of overtime accountability. Anything less than $5.4M will signal Council’s willingness to tolerate violence against protesters. Make your voice heard at the next Public Safety and Human Services Committee meeting on May 11. (This committee meets every second and fourth Tuesdays. We will continue to show up as long as it takes.)
Details and call scripts:
Send a quick email:
Defend the Defund
The DTD team has proliferated since the State of the Defund last month (see previous issue). Sub-groups are working on:
Protecting our gains from last year via CB 119981 (see above).
Moving abolitionist demands forward during SPOG (Seattle Police Officers Guild) contract negotiations.
Pressuring city council to not let a single cent of ARPA funds (federal stimulus dollars) go to SPD. Rather, they should be used to provide immediate & long term relief for communities most impacted by COVID and to fund a stronger, more equitable social infrastructure through participatory budgeting. Learn more here: Ensuring Federal Stimulus Funds Support Communities, Not Cops. Council’s finance committee is holding a public hearing today, May 4, at 5:30 pm to discuss spending priorities. Register to give public comment 2 hours beforehand. Sample call and email scripts are here:
There are plenty of smaller teams as well. If you have an idea for how to help defund SPD or want to offer your time and talent, contact Peter (shellito@gmail.com) and/or Alice (alicemarabe@gmail.com).
Participatory Budgeting
Where should the money go instead? The Black Brilliance Research project report laid out a road map to create a process that is truly community-led and centers Black lives.
Elders Speak
On Friday, April 16, Seattle-based elders voiced their support for participatory budgeting. You can watch them on the Seattle PB Outreach YouTube channel.
Attendees included:
Mr. Aaron Dixon, Co-Founder and Captain of the Seattle Chapter of the Black Panther Party and Executive Director of Central House. Watch here (<1 minute).
“This is something that we have wanted to have for a very long time. And any community in the world would like to have an opportunity to really decide where the money goes. And we haven’t had that opportunity.”
Mr. Franklyn Smith, Community Resource Program manager at the Dept. of Corrections Seattle Community Justice Center. Watch here (1:54).
“We are elders, and we are in favor. We are here to pledge our favoritism towards participatory budgeting because it is a community initiative. And we have all been in the campaign of community development, community togetherness.”
Mr. Claude Burfect, First Vice President of Seattle-King County NAACP. Watch here (3:55)
“The fact of the matter is that we need to be at the table in order to make sure where the monies are going to be spent, and we need to make sure that they are spending a large portion of those funds into Black communities.”
#FreePB Week of Action
From April 19th-23rd we held the #FreePB week of action to pressure the mayor to stop trying to control and stall the participatory budgeting process. Each day a different action was highlighted including emailing, tweeting, calling, and sending a postcard to the Mayor (which you can still do if you feel so inclined).
The week ended with a car caravan led by the Black Action Coalition that made stops at Council member Lewis’ and Mayor Durkan’s neighborhoods. SPD sent well over a dozen cruisers and countless officers into the Windermere neighborhood to intimidate us, further proving the fact that their budget needs to be cut.
Committee meeting canceled
Part of the week of action included giving public comment before a 60-minute presentation about PB from Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington and Andrés Mantilla (Department of Neighborhoods) to the Community Economic Development Committee, which was scheduled for April 20. That meeting was convened and then immediately adjourned due to the impending announcement of the Derek Chauvin verdict. This unfortunately functioned as another delay for PB. CM Morales said she would reschedule the presentation for the end of this week at the latest, but at Council Briefing Monday May 3, she backtracked and pushed it to the next regularly-scheduled committee meeting, on May 18. Mark your calendars to give public comments and ask about PB then.
Jenny’s Gotta Go
Two city employees, Ubax Gardheere and Boting (Bo) Zhang, wrote a public letter describing their traumatic experiences working for the City of Seattle, the impact the mayor in particular has had in further harming and dividing the community, and advice for the upcoming election:
“We’re done working for a dictator posturing as a Mayor. We’re done feeling increasingly out of touch with our communities and friends. And we’re done being women of color bearing a disproportionate emotional labor burden in our civilization’s collective reckoning with our mid-life (or is it end-of-life?) crisis.”
“This year, we can have an uplifting election cycle, if we all participate in making it so. We make space for our candidates to talk about vulnerability, and failure, and trauma, and the hard work of healing a society has continued to fail to solve any problem without generating three more. Let’s stop pretending that someone must have the answer. Let’s remember that the solution is on us, together.”
Details and further reporting in this PubliCola article.
Education
SAS Book Club
If anyone would like to join us for our third book club discussion on Mariame Kaba’s We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, we will be meeting May 20th from 6-7:30pm. Everyone is welcome. Contact renee.lamberjack@gmail.com for details.
By flip of a coin, Emergent Strategy by adrienne maree brown will be our next book. (In a different universe we are reading Mutual Aid by Dean Spade.) Get the book now and be ready to discuss it with us some time in June.
Live Conversation
“Prisons Make Us Safer”: And 20 Other Myths About Mass Incarceration: This conversation with Victoria Law and Andrea Ritchie offers a synthesis of the massive problem of prisons and policing by tracing the rise and cause of mass incarceration, myths about incarceration, misconceptions about incarcerated people, and steps to end mass incarceration on the way to abolition.
Join today, May 4, 3:30 to 5 pm at the link above.
Recent publications
Ibram X. Kendi
“Despite being in the middle of the pack on crime statistics, despite not solving most homicides, despite having the highest rates of violence in the wealthy world, the U.S. still rewards its police. American state and local governments collectively spend nearly $118.8 billion on policing, according to the Speaking Security newsletter. Only the United States ($731.8 billion) and China ($261.1 billion) spend more on their militaries than the United States spends on its police forces. Deciding not to defund, disarm, and draw down the police is an extremist, wasteful, violent, and anti-American position.”
Elena Gormley
Social Workers Can't Help People in Crisis by Partnering With Police
This article highlights the inherent flaws in the co-responder model in which social workers respond to emergency mental health calls with police. The author, who is a social worker, asks why the police need to be there at all, given that they have a very long history of assaulting and even killing people who are in the midst of a mental health crisis. Non-police crisis response programs, such as STAR in Denver and CAHOOTS in Eugene have been effective in reducing harm and providing needed services.
ACLU of Washington
SPD Surveillance Technologies Letter
In a letter from the ACLU and supporting organizations to the Seattle City Council, local advocates ask that the The Transportation and Utilities Committee takes steps to control the use of surveillance tech in policing. These systems, including Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR) and Computer Aided Dispatch (CAD) collect public data without providing clear policies about third party use and privacy. A bill approving these technologies, CB 120004, is currently in committee. Accountability and transparency are especially vital considering SPD’s racist record.
After the council approved these technologies on March 17th, the public was only given three days to comment. The ACLU urges the council to extend the comment period to allow the public to voice privacy and equity concerns surrounding policing surveillance tech.
Building Solidarity
MMIP Families Solidarity Prayer Walk
The Missing and Murdered Indigenous People (MMIP) and Families will be holding their first annual Solidarity Prayer Walk on May 15th starting at 10am at Be’er Sheva Park (8650 55th Ave S in Seattle). The event will end at 4pm at Othello Park (4351 S Othello St in Seattle). RSVP on their Facebook page.
“We are calling on all Afro Indigenous, BIPOC, Asian, Pacifca Peoples, LatinX, Mexican Indigenous, LGBTQ, Two Spirit, and allies to join us as we continue the fight for visibility and justice in ending the crisis of violence against Indigenous people across Indian Country. We want to acknowledge while the impacts of colonization, genocide, and historical trauma may look different in our communities. We want to acknowledge and honor those intersectional pieces that connect us. Please join us as we move together to create the change we want to see.”
-MMIP Families
Decrim Nature Seattle
The removal of harmful laws brings us closer to abolition. Decrim Nature Seattle is working to decriminalize psychedelics in the City. Follow them on Instagram.
Join us
We intend to provide:
Space for collective action among people who are already involved or want to be involved in abolition work.
Structure to share useful information, educate ourselves, and hold ourselves accountable.
A jumping-off point to support the work of BIPOC researchers and creators through (among other initiatives) BBR, PB, and Defend the Defund.
You can contribute to this newsletter or take part in efforts similar to those highlighted here by reaching out to any of us. Or read our organizing principles and join us here.