Brainstorm about a world w/o police, where people provide for each others' safety
- More community involvement and personal investment in community
- Having phone trees/knowledge about neighbors
- more confidence in our ability to care for each other
- Hapiness, friendliness
- Safety for everyone - not just the wealthy or housed
- taking responsibility whenever anything wrong is going on- no matter who it is
- an understanding in the general public not just of the benefits of police but also the risks- juducial process, lack of control
- Fluidity and communication between classes
- Skillsets for non-coercive compassionate conflict resolution
- knowing you can rely on the ppl around you to help you in case of emergency
- accountability for our own actions
- safety vs security- a sense of stability and security so there's no need for desperate choices
- Autonomy
- Mutual support, solidarity
- Home to mean more than house- desire for feeling of community in neighborhood
- community resiliency- friendship for strong communities, more gatherings
- common medical knowledge/health knowledge (mental, physical, environmental)
- knowing that my wolrd won't be poisoned
- healing and workshops w herbs and spirit- first responder skills, accessible knowledge.
- Change in the rigidity of laws- more case-to-case decision making
- Knowing that the members of my comm. have similar interests and goals
- sharing health knowledge
- elimination of the specialization of the cop role- more generalized participation from everyone rather than a select few holding all the power
- need separation between different sets of knowledge- EMTs, firefighters, cops, Red Cross,
- no sexism, more honor for crones and older women
3 comments:
Dear Young People
I admire and respect what you are trying to do. But it does not seem to me you are cognizant of the inherent contradiction in your overall posture. You talk of "community", clearly intending that to include "yourselves", that is "the anarchist community." But you are part of a larger community, the people of Santa Cruz. They share essentially all of your goals. But by your "anti-police" stance and rhetoric, you set yourselves apart from the "larger community's" efforts of deal with exactly the same problems you are attempting to address. Your "community" is part of the "larger community" -- that is simply a fact. Try to address common problems without acknowledging that reality, you are taking an "anti-ecology" stand -- the reality is that "everything is connected to everything." Deny that, you define yourselves as another isolated fragment, just like those other "isolated fragment" you like to rant against. We are all in this together.
Peace
Allan Lindh
Allan, thank you for your comment. We are trying to find solutions outside of police and institutions. If police were sufficient to solve difficult social problems, we would already have solved them. As it stands, with our societal trust in police we currently have a system that punishes not prevents crime, and most often only when it affects the property of those in power. We are looking for something much better than the same one we've inherited.
If some people aren't ready to work outside of the solutions offered us by police and courts, it is only because they have not yet fully experienced the ineffectiveness, institutional classism and racism, and coercive brutality of the police.
In fact, we are young and old with most of the people in the community safety workgroup working largely outside of the "anarchist community."
I hope you will join us this Thursday and contribute your voice.
Dear Bob Thanks for the invite, but there would be no point. As you are very clear, you are looking for solutions outside the "police and courts." This is from my perspective an illusion -- there is no outside, everything is connected to everything, we are all in this together. From my perspective having grown frustrated with the "system", you are now "playing pretend", and the offensive caricature you present of the police (...ineffectiveness, institutional classism and racism, and coercive brutality) is so far from an even slightly even-handed assessment that it is, I am sorry to say delusional. And if you mean to imply that I have not yet fully experienced the "ineffectiveness, institutional classism and racism, and coercive brutality of the police", I would remind you that I came of age in the '60's, when an entire generation stood up to the military-industrial machine. If you think the cops are mean now, you just have no idea. The cops are just like you and me, and as Alexander Solzhenitsyn reminds us (a man who know a bit about police state brutality) "the line between good and evil runs through the heart of each one of us." As long as you pretend you can draw that line between you and someone else, you are ducking your responsibility as a human being, IMHO.
Peace
Allan
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