Alabama activists say defunding police rooted in legacy of southern organizing article video image

Alabama Activists Say Defunding Police Rooted In Legacy Of Southern Organizing

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BIRMINGHAM, Alabama — Black freedom fighters in Alabama once changed this country.

Speaking onstage in Kelly Ingram Park on Juneteenth, Celestine Hood, a woman who witnessed radical change during the Civil Rights Movement, said Alabamians had the power to do it again.

Hood was a child in this park in May 1963, one of the young students participating in a demonstration for racial equality when Police Chief Eugene “Bull” Connor ordered attack dogs and firehoses on protesters. Images of children enduring that brutality enraged the world, sparking international support for the movement.

In May of this year, a video of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd, an unarmed Black man in custody for allegedly spending counterfeit money, shocked the world again. Protests erupted in big cities and rural towns, demanding an end to police and vigilante killings of Black people.

“We had dogs and firehoses,” Hood said. “You’ve got tear gas. You’ve got rubber bullets. It’s the same fight.”

The crowd of a few hundred — Black, brown and white, young and old —nodded, raised their fists.

police: smiling man with red shirt, khaki pants leans on SUV labelled Jacksonville Police

Alabama Police Chief Discusses Whether Policing Can Be Safer For Officers, Communities

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JACKSONVILLE, Alabama — When Marcus Wood was a kid, he said, the neighborhood police hosted barbecues for his community, handing out sticker badges, teaching him and his friends to fish. “I grew up in what you would call the projects,” Wood said. “Those cops influenced my life in a very positive way.”

Today Wood, 34, is the first Black police chief in Jacksonville, a small university town. A native of Weaver, Alabama, he previously worked as an Army police officer, a National Guardsman, a corrections officer, a fugitive investigator and a trainer for the state’s police academy at his alma mater, Jacksonville State University. 

This year, as Black Lives Matter protests assembled in cities around the world in the wake of Minnesota police killing George Floyd, an unarmed Black man suspected of using a counterfeit $20 bill, protesters gathered for days in Jacksonville to discuss police brutality and racism in the justice system. At the time, in June, Wood told a local TV news station: “We appreciate [protesters] being a force for us, because we don’t want bad cops in law enforcement.” The comment came with the announcement of a citywide curfew.

peer-on-peer romantic young couple kissin

In Peer-on-peer Child Sexual Abuse, States Differ on Who’s a Peer

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The phrase “peer on peer child sexual abuse” is well known. It implies an exploitative sexual relationship of one minor by another. But who is a “peer”? From the Latin word par the term infers equality. A dictionary definition of the word “peer” as a noun is “a person of the same age, the same social position, or having the same abilities as other people in a group,” or “one that is of equal standing with another.” 

As applied to child sexual abuse, David Finkelhor posited in 1986 that the perpetrator and victim were peers if they were less than five years apart.

Child holds black lives matter sign

In Demanding Justice For Black People, Are We Sacrificing the Peace of Black Youth?

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We met at Freedom Plaza. This was my first protest since the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. People of all ages, abilities, genders, races and ethnicities were there to stand up for justice. 

With an impassioned call to action from one of the organizers, the crowd headed toward Capitol Hill chanting, “No Justice, No Peace.” I fell in line toward the back, taking in the moment and the movement. 

As we walked, I noticed a dad and his son, no more than 3 or 4, walking with us. They were white. As the protest went on, the dad explained each chant to his son, encouraging him with the rhythm of the crowd.

Heroes Do Work In Detention Centers

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I'm a licensed clinical social worker providing behavioral health service in a juvenile detention center in a large urban area. My team is subcontracted to provide these services, so when the time came for organizations to scale back to essential services or essential employees only, we ended up shifting to remote work to limit the number of people going in and out of the detention center. With some trial and error and leaders coming together, we were able to adopt a telehealth platform in order to continue services to the best of our ability and to try to meet the needs of the detention center. From the provider side, we were able to say, “Sure, we can be flexible, we want to support the safety measures in place for the youth.” And I'm thinking to myself, when somebody says “We can be flexible” or “That's not a problem, we can try to meet the needs of whomever,” usually flexibility for our team means some sort of strain on somebody else. Essentially it transfers work to someone else to free up yourself to be flexible. 

Same with the center in this scenario.

juvenile records: word “criminal” in stack of papers

Juvenile Records Laws Must Be Reformed to Prevent Ongoing Racism

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The juvenile justice system was created 120 years ago to reform and rehabilitate “wayward” youth to ensure they had the opportunity to achieve productive futures. To this end, it was widely accepted that juvenile system involvement should remain confidential and that all records should be sealed or eradicated to ensure youth a clean slate upon reaching adulthood. Juvenile records laws were enacted to protect the privacy of system-involved youth. Today, however, the privacy protections afforded by juvenile records laws have hollowed out by loopholes and limitations that make confidentiality the exception more than the rule for many juvenile offenders. The broad accessibility permitted by juvenile records laws combined with technological innovation in data storage and mining make juvenile record information more available than ever.

probation officers: Close-up of angry man with smoke coming out from his ears

A Message to Probation Officers: Don’t Expect Youth to Show Up If You Don’t

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One of my favorite memes says, “Accountability feels like an attack when you’re not ready to acknowledge how your behaviors harm others.” Probation officers (POs) and youth share the responsibility for their own actions, as well as the actions of one another. Accountability isn’t easy, but it isn’t impossible. With POs modeling what it looks like to be accountable, it will set the example for youth to follow. Below I’ve narrowed it it down to three simple, but significant steps:
Show up
I had both a negative and positive experience with probation officers. The distinction between these two experiences was that my first PO only showed up for work, while my second PO (PO Choi) showed up to work and showed up for me.

New York Advocacy Group Unveils Plan to Increase Voting Among Family of Incarcerated

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NEW YORK — The Alliance of Families for Justice revealed a yearlong project on Wednesday, aimed at educating those who are incarcerated or have incarcerated family members on the importance of voting. Over the last year, the organization partnered with The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP)’s Making Policy Public project to create a large foldout poster. 

“When you receive our poster, you'll see that we focus on all aspects of the elimination of felony disenfranchisement so that someone's engagement with the criminal justice system should have no bearing on whether or not they get to exercise the franchise,” said Alliance Executive Director Soffiya Elijah. 

The Alliance of Families for Justice (AFJ), which works to end human rights violations inside prisons and jails and build communities and families who are affected, worked with graphic designers Tahnee Pantig and her teammate to create the poster. 

The poster’s design is intentionally different from the way anti-mass incarceration and social justice work are usually shown, Pantig said. “Like a lot of the images that we see, representing these communities are often shown from a light that can be very dark, very oppressive, and also one-sided, and we thought it was really important to demonstrate the resiliency, the agency, the activeness of these communities, that is already there,” she said. The designers also wanted the communities to see themselves in the illustrations. 

Elijah said the organization made 20,000 posters and hopes to share them across the state. 

AFJ has a multilayered plan to challenge felony disenfranchisement, she said, beginning with getting family members impacted by disenfranchisement registered to vote. Parolees in New York state, through an executive order by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, can now register and vote.

collaboration: Group of people stand around table in dark blue room, one woman gesturing.

Opinion: So, How Does This Collective Decision-making Work?

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We described in the previous column how the approach is four-tiered, beginning with collaboration. Collaboration is a term that has been bantered about and unfortunately, in some circles, gotten a black eye. The truth is that there is a best practice to collaboration that many don’t follow, and so it fails. Not because the concept is bad; it’s the user who doesn’t know what they’re doing.

tag: Line of police hold up riot shields on city street.

Violence, Unmarked Van at NY Protest Draw Comparisons to Portland Clashes

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NEW YORK — NYPD officers clashed violently with protestors again Tuesday night, this time in Madison Square Park in Manhattan, leaving one woman to be taken to jail in an unmarked police vehicle and six others in a transport van. The clashes came a week after New York Police Department officers destroyed a protest encampment at City Hall in New York in the predawn hours. Protests in the city and across the country have reignited as images of federal officers battling with protesters in Portland, Oregon have gripped the nation.  

Video shot at the march shows police beating protesters with batons and an unidentified woman being thrown into a silver unmarked van by people who said they were police. 

The video, posted to Instagram, shows people believed to be NYPD officers, though they weren’t wearing uniforms, pulling a woman into a tan minivan with New York license plates before speeding off. The sudden hustling of a protester into an unmarked car drew comparisons to the melee in Portland where federal officers without clear identification grab people off the street and toss them into cars. Uniformed bike officers with the NYPD created a wall around the van as if to provide assistance.