Post by abbey1227 on Jul 7, 2021 12:59:11 GMT
The Guardian
‘A slap in the face’: crime rise warnings ignore years of work by local organizers
Abené Clayton in Oakland Wed, July 7, 2021, 5:00 AM
<span>Photograph: Ben Margot/AP</span>
The last time homicide rates in Tinisch Hollins’ home town of San Francisco surged, she had few places to turn for support beside the police.
Homicide rates in the city hit triple digits in the mid-2000s. And at the time, Hollins said, resources for community organizers like herself who were advocating for crime survivors were far and few.
“We were talking about 15-year-olds doing drive-bys from bikes. So when you reach that level of desperation policing is the most accessible thing,” Hollins, who lost two brothers to gun violence, recalled.
Unlike decades before, however, the San Francisco Bay Area today boasts several violence prevention programs and services for crime victims that operate outside law enforcement, Hollins said. Hollins is now the executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice, an advocacy group.
“We didn’t have funded violence prevention programs like we do now. We had to fight and organize for that,” she added.
As cities across the United States are recording significant increases in homicides this year, police departments and some politicians have pointed at criminal justice reforms, low morale in police departments and officer resignations to explain the surge. Pushes to defund police departments coupled with surging gun sales have led to lawlessness, they argue, and cities should bolster police budgets and hire more officers to combat the violence.
That analysis fails to fully explain the current dynamics of rising violence. It doesn’t factor in the impact of the pandemic on vulnerable communities and the disruption brought on by lockdowns to violence prevention strategies. Furthermore, research has shown that cities that increased police budgets were just as likely to see a rise in murders as cities that reduced them.
While Democrats and Republicans are invoking the murder of Black and Brown people to make their political arguments, organizers from the most affected communities say their own voices and solutions are not being heard. Relying on arrests and prosecutions to reduce violent crime has helped fuel mass incarceration and has led to the over-representation of Black and Latinx people in the nation’s prisons and jails, organizers say, destabilizing many already underserved families and contributing to the cycle of gun violence in these communities. And the emphasis on arrests ignores the strides that have been made by grassroots violence prevention and victim advocacy groups in past years, efforts that have proven to save lives.
‘A slap in the face’: crime rise warnings ignore years of work by local organizers
Abené Clayton in Oakland Wed, July 7, 2021, 5:00 AM
<span>Photograph: Ben Margot/AP</span>
The last time homicide rates in Tinisch Hollins’ home town of San Francisco surged, she had few places to turn for support beside the police.
Homicide rates in the city hit triple digits in the mid-2000s. And at the time, Hollins said, resources for community organizers like herself who were advocating for crime survivors were far and few.
“We were talking about 15-year-olds doing drive-bys from bikes. So when you reach that level of desperation policing is the most accessible thing,” Hollins, who lost two brothers to gun violence, recalled.
Unlike decades before, however, the San Francisco Bay Area today boasts several violence prevention programs and services for crime victims that operate outside law enforcement, Hollins said. Hollins is now the executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice, an advocacy group.
“We didn’t have funded violence prevention programs like we do now. We had to fight and organize for that,” she added.
As cities across the United States are recording significant increases in homicides this year, police departments and some politicians have pointed at criminal justice reforms, low morale in police departments and officer resignations to explain the surge. Pushes to defund police departments coupled with surging gun sales have led to lawlessness, they argue, and cities should bolster police budgets and hire more officers to combat the violence.
That analysis fails to fully explain the current dynamics of rising violence. It doesn’t factor in the impact of the pandemic on vulnerable communities and the disruption brought on by lockdowns to violence prevention strategies. Furthermore, research has shown that cities that increased police budgets were just as likely to see a rise in murders as cities that reduced them.
While Democrats and Republicans are invoking the murder of Black and Brown people to make their political arguments, organizers from the most affected communities say their own voices and solutions are not being heard. Relying on arrests and prosecutions to reduce violent crime has helped fuel mass incarceration and has led to the over-representation of Black and Latinx people in the nation’s prisons and jails, organizers say, destabilizing many already underserved families and contributing to the cycle of gun violence in these communities. And the emphasis on arrests ignores the strides that have been made by grassroots violence prevention and victim advocacy groups in past years, efforts that have proven to save lives.
“It’s frustrating that this conversation is being leveraged and exploited to become a political conversation rather than one about the disparities that are now worse,” Hollins said. “It’s also a big slap in the face to the organizing that’s been done around violence.”
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