There has to be a readjustment of resources that is being diverted to police and policing as opposed to community health services, and there certainly has to be control over the police by the communities that they are supposed to protect and serve.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the need to allocate more resources to community health services rather than excessive funding for policing, advocating for community control over law enforcement.
Alicia Garza's quote addresses the critical need for a reevaluation of how societal resources are distributed, highlighting the imbalance between funding for police forces and community health services. It advocates for prioritizing the health and well-being of communities over punitive measures and emphasizes the necessity of community oversight in police actions to ensure that those entrusted with public safety are accountable and truly serve the interests of the communities they are meant to protect.
In practice
This quote can be referenced in discussions on police reform during community meetings.
Whether or not you call it Black Lives Matter, whether or not you put a hashtag in front of it, whether or not you call it the Movement for Black Lives, all of that is irrelevant. Because there was resistance before Black Lives Matter, and there will be resistance after Black Lives Matter.
What we've seen is an attempt by mainstream politics and politicians to co-opt movements that galvanize people in order for them to move closer to their own goals and objectives. We don't think that playing a corrupt game is going to bring change and make black lives matter.
I think that there are real concerns that we have around whose life is important and why. So if the official story is, for example, somebody was running from the police, does their life matter?
We need to make sure that we have an honest, honest conversation and that we engage honest practices around how racism operates in this country. It's not just about people being mean to each other.
Coming out of the 2016 election, there was a few things that became really clear. One, that black people deserve to have vehicles that represent the breadth of our interests. Two, that we really need to do a better job of being able to communicate what conditions and experiences our communities are facing.
As you keep pulling back the layers of how deeply rooted anti-blackness and white supremacy are in this country, it is exhausting, and it is traumatizing.
We live in an interconnected world, in an interconnected time, and we need holistic solutions. We have a crisis of inequality, and we need climate solutions that solve that crisis.
Public housing officials are free to discriminate against you on the basis of criminal records, including arrest records. And so, you know, what you find is that even for these extremely minor offenses, people find themselves trapped in a permanent second-class status and struggling to survive.
Injustice boils in men's hearts as does steel in its cauldron, ready to pour forth, white hot, in the fullness of time.
In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, 'booming' state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release. The incarceration of black Australians here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid.
If we continue to tolerate this level of poverty in our cities, and go along with eviction as commonplace in poor neighborhoods, it's not for a lack of resources. It will be a lack of something else.
This stereotype that Black and brown boys and girls are dangerous or threatening has normalized systems of trauma: the cradle to prison pipeline, foster care, youth detention, and being tried and sentenced as adults. We treat trauma with more trauma.
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