Session 4:

African and Black Radical Tradition: Co-opted

Thursday 15 April 2021 ~ 10:55am - 12:10pm Pacific

with ASL interpretation in the Q&A (with apologizes for the incomplete recording)

Recording available here (75 mins)

I Support the Movement, but...: How Non-Black Activists Interpret and Respond to "Defund the Police"

Jesse Yeh

After nearly a decade of activism, Black Lives Matter received growing attention and support in the US political mainstream in the summer of 2020. With the attention and influx of new supporters came growing division about the demands of the movement. In particular, calls for defunding the police generated great disagreements. As the new Biden administration, as well as cities across the US, are increasingly receptive to reforms, it is indispensable to empirically understand the content of these disagreement. This paper asks how do non-Black liberal activists interpret and respond to the call to defund the police. This paper draws from original interview data with non-Black Southern California electoral activists. I found that, although all were eager to disclaim—often without prompting—that they support the movement in general and the spirit of “defund the police” in particular, almost all of my respondents believed the demand to be “poorly worded.” Yet, when asked, most in fact articulated preferred solutions that are contradictory, if not entirely in opposition, to decreasing funding towards policing. Furthermore, most continue to evade the issue as one of racial justice and instead de-racialize both the issue of police killings itself, as well as the various relevant political and movement actors. Interestingly, most positive reactions to the demand are framed as one of fiscal prudence and efficiency. As those activists often have outsized access and influence over local and congressional elected officials, their reinterpretation of the movement demands are likely to be consequential.

Jesse Yeh (he/him) is a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan's Public Policy and Sociology program. Jesse's research interests broadly include crime and law, social movement and political sociology, and race and immigration. Jesse is currently working on his dissertation project exploring how liberal and conservative activists make sense of "law and order" politics in the aftermath of the Trump presidency.

Los Angeles and William H. Parker: Race, Drugs, and Policing during the Red Scare

Roberto A. Mónico

My presentation is part of my dissertation Los Angeles and William H. Parker: Race, Drugs, and Policing during the Red Scare centers on the 1950s and 1960s with a focus on William H. Parker as the architect of oppressive policing tactics targeting nonwhites. I examine race, anti-drug policies, the Red Scare, and the policing of jazz nightclubs to show how Parker and the LAPD disrupted the social cohesion transpiring in Los Angeles. A city that afforded job opportunities to non-white migrants relocating to California. I discuss how Parker and the LAPD transformed policing with the arrival of African Americans and people of Mexican descent to Los Angeles and juxtapose them against the white population to reveal how law enforcement surveilled these communities, specifically in East Los Angeles and the Central Avenue district. I argue that this era must be re-examined to understand the origins of the draconian policies such as “broken windows” and “stop-and-frisk.” This project sheds new light on methods which have become prevalent and normalized among today’s local police institutions. This period is of particular importance because the LAPD became the policing model emulated by many police departments across the United States. If my proposal is accepted, I would like to present the first chapter of my dissertation, which focused on the architect, William H. Parker who designed the current policing strategies that we have unfortunately become accustomed to.

Roberto Mónico is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Ethnic Studies department at the University of Colorado Boulder. I grew up in Los Angeles in the 80s and 90s. My research interest focuses on early policing strategies and how such policies affect us today. I am particularly interested in the methods that the LAPD used to criminalize BIPOC and radical leftist organizations in the early and mid-nineteenth century.

The 911 Call as a Horizon of Abolition

Michelle Brown, Kyra Martinez, and Vivian Swayne

What happens when you take a year’s worth of your city’s police call data and work your way toward a horizon of abolition? In our context of the Appalachian South, we were called upon to do just this by way of a Black-led city council movement seeking progressive and transformative governance, including efforts to defund the police. Through a participatory framework, we analyze the empirical reasons that people typically call the police in order to conceptualize the structural forces and needs animating the police call and to develop alternatives. From property offenses to accident response, officer-initiated calls to interpersonal conflict and violence, as well as the ubiquitous 911 hangup, we engage with how organizers and engaged scholars are imagining safety processes in relation to these issues without police or prisons. We also lay out the structural tensions and challenges that arise in those efforts in relation to law’s violence, including the propensity to reproduce police and racialized carceral logics. We seek to illuminate these stakes by providing an analysis of the critical role of participatory budgets, infrastructure, and community resources that are organized definitively against the carceral state.

Michelle Brown is a critical criminologist and visual scholar at the University of Tennessee, working to decarcerate the Appalachian South, with loved ones living inside and working for the prison state. Her work focuses upon countervisual practices and strategies – how we unsee prisons, police, and empires in order to build emancipatory infrastructure. She is the author of The Culture of Punishment; the co-editor of The Routledge International Handbook of Visual Criminology, The Oxford Encyclopedia of Crime, Media and Popular Culture, and the Palgrave MacMillan Crime, Media and Culture Book Series.

Kyra Martinez is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Tennessee, with research interests in drugs, sensory experience, body politics, and practices of radical care. Her work focuses on harm reduction, where she also does community work, as a site where the carceral is not only encountered as ‘care’ but where the carceral must encounter care as it interfaces with radical networks of mutual aid/support that emerge from its limits.

Vivian Swayne, born and raised in Appalachia, is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Tennessee. Swayne found sociology at the same time her loved one was incarcerated, fostering her ongoing commitment to decarceration. Her research interests include law and society, sex and society, police and prison abolition movements, and visual methodologies, all of which she combined in her recent MA thesis, an analysis and indictment of institutionalized state sexual violence. She has experience in community organizing and the non-profit sector, where she has interacted with both state agents and those directly impacted by policing and incarceration. She is currently the Newsletter Editor for the American Sociological Association’s Section on Sex and Gender.