Hello, Friends. I hope you are okay.
I’ve been sharing tweets on Instagram this week. I screengrab the tweet and put it in my Stories, and I tag the writer on Instagram if I can find their account. I know there are a lot of people on Instagram who don’t use Twitter, and I wanted to give them a sense of what I was seeing.
My Instagram followers asked me to save the screen-grabbed tweets to a highlight. So I did. But then it filled up (you can only put 100 stories in a highlight). So I made a second highlight and it’s almost full too.
You can see what I’ve shared in highlight one, and highlight two.
I’ve received hundreds and hundreds of responses from my Instagram followers. The responses to stories come as DMs (direct messages), which means they sort of go into an Instagram inbox, and they can only be seen by me. Lots of emotional responses — which is no surprise. But also lots of disbelief. There are too many people who don’t want to believe that police officers all over the country are attacking peaceful protesters. But it is happening. It’s very, very real.
I don’t think anybody could see what has been shared this week, and not come away convinced that policing in our country needs to be completely dismantled and reimagined. The amount of corruption, over-funding, and abuse can’t be “reformed”. It needs to be taken apart, and built again from completely new materials. There is no part of the current system that is worth saving.
With that, here are a few things I’ve wanted to share with you. Heads up: It’s all quite heavy.
-“…we keep imagining that we can turn police into social workers. That we can make them nice, friendly community outreach workers. But police are violence workers.”
-Please take a minute to read this thread on what people mean when they say #AbolishThePolice.
-Please read this book called The End of Policing.
-D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser had the words “Black Lives Matter” painted in big yellow letters on the street where protesters have been demonstrating.
-21% of Americans have zero or negative net worth, the highest on record. Among black families, 37% have nothing. Same percentage for young people. ‘Protecting property’ is an abstraction for people who own nothing.
-Why It’s So Rare For Police Officers To Face Legal Consequences.
-“An FBI advisory board later found that roughly 40 percent of officers who filled out questionnaires in a number of different settings admitted to being physically violent with their spouse in the previous six months.”
-A post I wrote in June 2015 about the Charleston shooting. It feels like we’ve been having conversations like this for so long. Have we finally reached a changing point?
Here are a few tweets I saved for you:
-Five days ago, Greg Doucette started compiling a thread of police brutality incidents at protests. The thread is now over 300 posts long.
-Can’t manage that 300+ thread? At least watch this short, horrific example.
Different angle on 1️⃣1️⃣1️⃣ out of Indianapolis
From this view you can see the cop grope the woman he’s restraining, that’s why she breaks away
Then of course a half dozen cops beat her for not wanting to be groped
Lawlessness pic.twitter.com/6XXU7qiULj
— T. Greg Doucette (@greg_doucette) June 4, 2020
-Don’t forget, therapists and nurses have to physically restrain clients and patients who are violent, confused, intoxicated, belligerent, and mentally ill, and they do it without batons, tasers, guns, or violence.
-The police have chosen a side.
-Please read this incredibly moving and harrowing thread on police inaction regarding domestic abuse.
-They know they are on video and they don’t hesitate to be violent. How violent are they when there’s no video?
-Please read this thread about a protester arrested in LA.
-A thread about tear gas.
-Our priorities are all wrong.
–Another thread about police officers and rape. Lots of articles documenting widespread sexual assault committed by police.
I hope you get an internet break this weekend. I’ll meet you back here next week. I miss you already.
kisses,
Gabrielle
Angela Davis painting by Neon Honey.
