From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject DeRay Mckesson on the 8 Reforms That Could Dramatically Reduce Police Violence
Date June 6, 2020 3:25 AM
  Links have been removed from this email. Learn more in the FAQ.
  Links have been removed from this email. Learn more in the FAQ.
[Campaign Zero has a concrete, data-backed proposal for changing
how police departments use force. ] [[link removed]]

DERAY MCKESSON ON THE 8 REFORMS THAT COULD DRAMATICALLY REDUCE POLICE
VIOLENCE   [[link removed]]

 

Alex Shultz
June 3, 2020
GQ Magazine
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

_ Campaign Zero has a concrete, data-backed proposal for changing how
police departments use force. _

,

 

Civil rights activist DeRay Mckesson is relieved that, after the
murder of George Floyd
[[link removed]] and
a new wave of protests against police brutality, there’s renewed
[[link removed]] momentum
[[link removed]] behind
[[link removed]] the
idea of reducing funding for police departments. But Mckesson says
that goal, as laudable as it is, can’t be the only focus of police
reform. “Police are still going to be here tomorrow,” he points
out. Hence #8Can’tWait [[link removed]], a set of proposals
aimed at reducing the use of force by police unveiled by Mckesson and
the team at Campaign Zero on Wednesday.

Campaign Zero was formed in 2015 by a group of activists and
researchers with the goal of collecting and publicizing police
department data and practices in order to understand how to
significantly reduce police violence. The research that led to 8
Can’t Wait also began in 2015 with what soon became the Police Use
of Force Project [[link removed]]—a
numbers-driven, reader-friendly examination of the violent tactics
that police departments in America’s 100 largest cities employ. The
idea is that, if police departments adopt eight reforms of when and
how they use force, the ensuing data shows a significant drop in
killings—as much as 72% [[link removed]] if all eight are
followed. The policies are as follows:

*
Ban chokeholds and strangleholds

*
Require de-escalation

*
Require warning before shooting

*
Exhaust all other means before shooting

*
Duty to intervene and stop excessive force by other officers

*
Ban shooting at moving vehicles

*
Require use-of-force continuum

*
Require comprehensive reporting each time an officer uses forces or
threatens to do so

When Campaign Zero began its research, cops were not very willing to
disclose what they are or are not allowed to do to citizens.
Mckesson’s hope is that at this moment when national attention is
once again focused on police violence, normally skittish and
unresponsive local governments might be compelled to take action. When
you plug in your city on the 8 Can’t Wait website, you’ll see how
the local police department is handling the eight reforms, and
you’re given the contact information of your mayor or sheriff.

In an interview with _GQ_, Mckesson expanded on what the 8 Can’t
Wait data reveals, the separate discussion of shifting resources away
from cops, and what he thinks of this round of protests.

GQ: WHAT WENT INTO THE PROCESS OF COLLECTING ALL THIS USE-OF-FORCE
DATA?

_DeRay Mckesson:_ Police use-of-force documents are actually not
public in many places. It took us a year to get them, either by
FOIAing them, or fighting the department, or finding a lawyer who sued
the department.

Here’s the thing: At the minimum, the rules by which officers can
kill you should be public. You as a citizen deserve to at least know
the rules, right? That was the philosophy by which we went about this
at the beginning. We actually had no clue what we’d found, we just
thought there might be something there. What we found surprised us.

IT SEEMS THAT POLICE DEPARTMENTS BY AND LARGE AREN’T FOLLOWING THE
USE-OF-FORCE POLICIES YOU RECOMMEND.
Exactly. And these are so simple. We don’t think there needs to be a
whole lot of discussion about banning choke holds and strangleholds.
We don’t think it’s a big ask to say, “We’re not going to
shoot into moving vehicles.” These asks are simple, but not small.
The impact is large.

The hard part is this analysis and data is new and the first of its
kind. And the police say, “If you restrict our ability to use these
types of force, you make us less safe.” That actually isn’t true.
In cities where there are more restrictive force policies, the police
are actually safer, and communities are actually safer. The police
will also say things about crime being rampant if they can’t use
force. That’s not true either.

OUT OF THE EIGHT POLICIES LISTED, ARE THERE ONE OR TWO THAT YOU’VE
FOUND POLICE DEPARTMENTS ESPECIALLY OBSTINATE ABOUT CHANGING?

The police never have an argument against any of the policies, because
they’d sound absurd. There’s not really a good argument for why
you wouldn’t ban chokeholds. They say it’s all symbolic, and
police use their best judgment, and we should trust them. That’s
only an argument against the _theory_ of use of force.WHEN YOU
ORIGINALLY PROPOSED A USE-OF-FORCE TEMPLATE A FEW YEARS AGO, WHAT
HAPPENED?

Since we’ve launched, many cities have changed their policies in
some way. Some have changed one or two policies, some have changed
more. There are only two cities in the top 100 that have satisfied all
eight policies—Tucson and San Francisco—and San Francisco only has
all eight because the federal government forced them to
[[link removed]].
One of the reasons there hasn’t been more movement is that, again,
there hasn’t been data like this before, and also, there are a lot
of supporters of police reform who feel like they’re not smart
enough to understand policy—that policy is in this special realm
that only people with PhDs can understand. That’s not true, and we
want to normalize and demystify these policies. All of these policies
are simple and clear enough for anyone to be an expert on.

DO YOU THINK THE CURRENT PROTESTS MIGHT ALLOW FOR MORE PRESSURE AND
MOVEMENT ON ENACTING THESE POLICIES?
Absolutely. There’s never been a push like this. We’re hopeful,
we’re excited. I think people are hungry for action, hungry for
something that’ll have an impact, and it’s clear these will have
an impact and make communities safer. What’s powerful about these
policies is the mayor or police chief have almost unilateral power to
just enact them. They rarely require a vote or hearing. In most of the
100 largest cities, the mayor could just come out tomorrow and say,
“We ban chokeholds.” Most of the other interventions we
want—police union contracts, shifting resources away from police
departments—the mechanism by which you do it is a little more
complicated.

HAVE YOU FOUND THESE NATIONWIDE PROTESTS DIFFERENT IN ANY SIGNIFICANT
WAYS THAN PROTESTS OF PREVIOUS YEARS?
I think it’s the same spirit of the protests of 2014. I think it’s
an acknowledgement that the police have continued to kill people. I
think people were promised change in 2014 and it didn’t come.

HOW DO THE POLICY PROPOSALS YOU’VE MENTIONED WORK IN COORDINATION
WITH, OR RELATE TO, A LARGER GOAL OF DEFUNDING POLICE DEPARTMENTS?

I want to push back on that a little bit. All of these are large. The
language of “large” is sort of odd to me. There are two pockets to
this: Reduce the power of the police, and then shift the resources, or
shift the role. Most of the defund work is about shifting the role,
which is incredibly important, but police are still going to be here
tomorrow. Shrink the role work is gradual work. Even the most
aggressive proposals don’t take away any money from the police that
they currently have; they normally prevent the police from
getting _more_ money.

What we’re saying is if the police are going to exist tomorrow, they
should have dramatically less power tomorrow. And we’re working to
shift all of the responsibilities away from policing that have nothing
to do with policing. We don’t need a person with a gun to go find a
missing child; we don’t need a person with a gun to show up at a car
crash; we don’t need a person with a gun to show up in a mental
health crisis. That’s about shrinking the role and the
responsibilities, and shifting them somewhere else. That’s the core
of a defund strategy. But this is a both/and situation. Not an
either/or. Both are big and have very different impacts.

_This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity._

_More by Alex Shultz_ [[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
* [[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web [[link removed]]
Submit via email
Frequently asked questions [[link removed]]
Manage subscription [[link removed]]
Visit xxxxxx.org [[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]
Screenshot of the email generated on import

Message Analysis

  • Sender: Portside
  • Political Party: n/a
  • Country: United States
  • State/Locality: n/a
  • Office: n/a
  • Email Providers:
    • L-Soft LISTSERV