Posted on 07/04/2017 10:01:38 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
This summer will mark the third anniversary of the death of Eric Garner, a New York man who was killed by police officers outside of a neighborhood convenience store in Staten Island (he was suspected of illegally selling loose cigarettes). Garner’s death is one of many that has raised Americans’ concerns about the increasing number of Black men, women, and children killed by U.S. law enforcement officers.
At only 13 percent of the U.S. population, African Americans are killed by police, incarcerated, live in poverty, and have poor health at higher rates than White Americans, who make up the majority populace. These numbers and conditions are much the same as those attributed to other disenfranchised citizens, including Latino Americans, who are 17 percent of the population.
Contemporary movements continue to address these tragedies.
Black Lives Matter is campaigning against the criminal justice system, calling for an end to racial profiling, police brutality and killings, and for officers to be held accountable for their actions. The Movement for Black Lives policy platform, released last summer, is demanding the reallocation of resources to improve and protect the lives of all Black people in the United States—citizens, immigrants, cis, trans, queer, gender nonconforming, and differently-abled. And, in response to the Trump administration’s deportation machine, cities are looking for ways to create safe spaces for immigrants and refugees in the sanctuary movement.
Earlier this year, a campaign was launched to extend these ideas to all marginalized groups that need safety. Named Freedom Cities, this campaign expands on the sanctuary movement to create a framework for cities to offer protection to all oppressed people in the United States.
Marginalized U.S. citizens need protection, too
Historically, sanctuary cities or states have existed since slavery, when certain areas were identified as safe zones for enslaved Africans who had escaped their owners’ plantations. But the term became more common in the 1980s, under the Reagan administration, when protests grew against federal immigration laws that prevented Central American refugees from gaining asylum in the United States. Pastors designated their churches as sanctuaries for the undocumented immigrants, who were poor and homeless. Today, this concept—sanctuary as a strategy in which cities refuse to invest local resources in immigration enforcement—does not go far enough, some say.
On Inauguration Day, a coalition of New York City-based organizations held a mass demonstration outside the Trump Hotel, demanding resources for oppressed communities not only to survive, but also to thrive. The coalition wants sanctuary to include the provision of safety for citizens who live in danger daily. Members ask, “Where is the sanctuary when ICE is setting up checkpoints and conducting raids in our communities? Where is the sanctuary for folks impacted by the War on Drugs, racial profiling, or police violence? Where is the sanctuary for people with convictions?” Cities, towns, and neighborhoods need to be safe for low-wage workers, Black, Latino, and Muslim Americans—as well as immigrants—they say.
Enlace, an international multicultural alliance of low-wage worker centers, unions, and community groups in NYC, is a member of the New York Worker Center Federation, the coalition that is organizing Freedom Cities. Enlace Executive Director Daniel Carrillo says the group is shifting how safety is defined.
“The way that Trump and past [presidential] administrations defined it was more prisons, more police in the streets, more deportation and detention,” says Carrillo. The Freedom Cities campaign seeks to change that and look at what safety means for whole communities, he explains. “Because all those measures don’t create safety actually. They create more of a police state for us.”
The goal of Freedom Cities, he adds, is for all people to be safe and free from the threat of physical violence and economic disadvantage: immigrants—documented or undocumented—people with criminal convictions, workers, gender nonconforming folks, the poor, and all people of color.
Freedom Cities strategy and framework
Days after the 2016 presidential election, the plan for Freedom Cities emerged at a meeting run by NYWCF, a multicultural coalition of organizations for the rights of workers, immigrants, and people of color. The coalition wasn’t just responding to the election. It sought to address the violence and oppression against marginalized groups that had been taking place for years. In particular, coalition members looked to the deaths of Garner and Delfino Velazquez—a New York construction worker who in November 2014 was killed on the job because of contractor negligence—and the addition of 1,300 NYPD officers the following year. While city officials proclaimed more police officers meant safer neighborhoods, these activists disagreed.
So they have developed the Freedom Cities campaign to create safer communities. The demands in the framework are inspired by various social justice organizations’ campaigns over the past decade. Members studied sanctuary city tenets and the Movement for Black Lives policy platform. The Freedom Cities campaign builds on these movements and applies their core principles to issues of immigrant rights, police brutality, gender justice, and state violence. The result is a six-point platform for what the campaign will work toward. This includes:
1. Ending Criminalization
Divest from policing and militarization and invest in programs that produce real public safety, such as mental health services and restorative practices. This includes campaigns to end practices such as broken windows policing.
2. Economic Justice and Workers Rights
Create labor protections, jobs, and employment opportunities for workers. Engage in efforts to combat discrimination, increase wages, and protect the right to organize.
3. Investment in People and Planet
Divert resources toward communities’ basic needs, including housing, education, health, (nutritious) food, and safety net programs. Protect our communities from environmental injustices.
4. Community Control
Gain real control of the institutions that people interact with daily, including police and other public agencies.
5. Community Defense
Establish systems of self-defense in neighborhoods to protect rights and dignity.
6. Global Justice
Link national struggles for liberation with others across the world. Recognize that our identities and migration histories connect us globally, and that we are part of an international movement of those who believe that everybody deserves safety and freedom.
Organizers say the action plans are still in development. However, one tactic that Freedom Cities is looking to engage in initially and build upon is Hate Free Zones.
Hate Free Zones, Peace Zones for Life
A model for Hate Free Zones currently exists in Detroit under the designation Peace Zones for Life. For the past five years, Peace Zones has worked to address community violence and interpersonal conflict, which organizers say can bring about police violence when officers are called to scenes of crime or domestic disputes.
The group facilitates community meetings, where participants discuss “what peace zones look and feel like.” Organizers have found that sometimes discord comes from the feeling of being ignored. The meetings allow all voices at the table to be heard and space for leaders to emerge within the community.
Artwork plays a role in Peace Zones, too, and the campaign works to beautify neighborhoods to let potential troublemakers know that crime is not welcome, and lessen the need for heavy police presence in their neighborhoods.
Similarly, Freedom Cities’ Hate Free Zones seek to end the practice of broken windows policing by restoring and reclaiming neighborhoods through resources that could prevent community violence. The Hate Free Zones campaign extends to Islamophobia, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia.
“I know that there are neighborhood watch groups that work with the police, but in these times where you have to watch out for your neighbors and police from attacking you, this is the alternative for targeted communities and their allies to organize and create safe communities,” Carrillo.
Linking struggles
When Freedom Cities launched in January, it attracted the attention of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, where Black Lives Matter co-founder Opal Tometi is a member. The two organizations have partnered with NYWCF’s Freedom Cities campaign.
“What many people don’t know is that Black immigrants, like African Americans [and Latinos], live in communities subjected to over-policing, racial profiling, and practices such as broken windows, that result in them experiencing criminal contact more often than their White counterparts, and ultimately disproportionate deportation rates,” says Carl Lipscombe, deputy director of BAJI. For this reason, BAJI has led and participated in a number of campaigns that build toward freedom cities over the past few years.
While it’s not the first time multicultural alliances have formed in social justice movements, members recognize the challenges and benefits of working together.
“It takes incredible humility and strength to reach out or to accept a call from someone reaching out to restore bridges, or build new ones,” Carrillo says. “It is definitely a process … of learning from each other and developing trust.”
The process, he says, includes learning how to talk about each others’ issues and using messaging that does not undermine one another’s work.
So, unity building is necessary, especially in this time of fear and separation of families, says Rosanna Rodríguez, the co-executive director of Laundry Workers Center, another member organization of the NYWCF. Rodríguez says the Freedom Cities campaign creates a safe space to unite.
“Freedom Cities brings to our work the real solidarity [among] the different groups … working with the same purpose together. Our struggles for liberation have always been linked with others across the world.”
alert...alert...Sanction Cities soon to be renamed Freedom Cities
Communists
How about establishing drug free zones. Gang free zones. And crime free zones.
We need more Christians per square mile. Then everyone can thrive.
Hey, what about unicorns. We need more unicorns, too.
Libs may learn that cities supporting school prayer or are anti-abortion could also become ‘sanctuaries’
http://jewishworldreview.com/0617/codevilla061917.php3
I call bullsh!t on this "statistic". If you want to make blanket assertions such as that, you need to back it up, instead of just throwing it out there and expecting everyone to automatically buy it...
"...Freedom Cities..."
You stole this from The Onion right? Please say yes....
Disenfranchised? Who?
(Typical nonsensical social justice warrior speak - ten pounds in a five pound bag.)
Sounds like the most logical plan of all.
Eric Garner died if a lethal dose combination if too many cheeseburgers and big government.
You’re making me hungry for a Quarter Pounder.
BLM is a terrorist group so anything they have to do with is automatically bad news.
Broken window policing is what made the Times Square of today. Rudy Guiliani found out, with empirical evidence, that stopping the broken windows became the first domino in stopping all forms of crime.
Black persons also commit more crimes per capita. This is mostly a reflection of a large subclass of habitual criminals and a particular subculture that they underwrite.
This subclass victimizes and terrorizes a majority of innocent black people ... and not coincidentally, IIRC, that it is ALSO relatively common for black people to use guns in self defense against the predations of those selfsame criminals!
Such a criminal subclass is not a new phenomenon nor by any means unique to urban black Americans as other examples have been known among various ethnic groups both east and west coast during the 19th and 20th centuries. They too had times when they would have come under closer official scrutiny, and some even helped bring about the existence of police departments as we know them.
It is not poverty that makes such criminals but a want of moral soundness, even a want of religious scruples.
Still, under the influence of 60s and 70s style commie inspired race radicalism there are especially pernicious aspects to aforementioned criminal subculture that have made this a worst case scenario.
Firstly, it excuses wrongdoing and promotes an environment that both protects the criminal element and lionizes them as victims of injustice should they get shot in the commission of a crime. By this I mean it seems like many otherwise innocent, honest and peaceable black people make themselves the proverbial tall grass, and not just those with close ties to the criminals.
Secondly it holds out a context for an extra-special kind of “here’s your sign” stupid to flourish, by which I mean people burning down their own communities because they are angry about stuff. The collapse of many communities, and the hopelessness that grips them, really seems to have “caught on” once blacks were burning down black neighborhoods.
Third, and last for this post, the specific popular subculture is not merely influenced by this criminal element it can be said to have been dominated by it. Even to the point that an actual successful artist can lose popularity when he’s discovered to be an ordinary Joe and not the thug he pretended to be.
So, yes, some black people (habitual criminals) commit a lot more crimes so they do run a risk of getting shot in the process. Dur! It probably doesn’t help things that there’s a “we vs they” mentality at work.
Even still, it seems that cops are MORE likely to pull the trigger when it’s a white perp than when it’s a black perp. Of course white people don’t go all NVTS over whites getting shot by police, or whites getting shot in general it sometimes seems, unless the victims are very young of if she was really cute. But oh the drama from the black community over every incident, even with examples of self defense, just so long as the shooter is white, Hispanic, Asian or a cop of any race.
But with blacks shooting blacks, which like whites shooting whites is by far the most common occurrence, there’s hardly a peep heard in the press ... again, unless the victim is very young or cute.
These people are their own worst enemies. In fact, they themselves are their only enemies.
The rest of the world is just getting on with life, and are wondering what the hell's the matter with them.
More FAKE news by a racist.
Lost me when she said Eric Garner was killed by the police.
He died of a heart attack in an ambulance.
More FAKE news by a racist.
Lost me when she said Eric Garner was killed by the police.
He died of a heart attack in an ambulance.
Same old black Marxist bullshit.
The manifesto denies the trillions spent on trying to help lift the black lower economic class out and upwards but the Democrats keep them down and disenfranchises (many blacks would vote for conservatives in a minute of they were told the truth in plain English on how the libs/left have failed them.
Just another race hustle, environmental wacko rip off attempt, and the typical Democrat “keep ‘em down on the farm (ghetto) with promises and walk around money”.
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