Making Noise & Making News: June 2023

Our community organizing, legal work, and strategic communications have contributed to exciting developments in the last few months for many of the issues we work on at the Abolitionist Law Center. Check out our June 2023 update for a sampling of the latest highlights.


RECORD-BREAKING SETTLEMENT IN PHILLY POLICE VIOLENCE SUIT

In March, with our co-counsels the Legal Defense Fund and the law firm of Kairys, Rudovsky, Messing, Feinberg & Lin LLP, we announced a record-breaking $9.25 million settlement for a large group of clients (represented in several cases, including ours) who were brutally attacked by Philly cops during peaceful demonstrations following George Floyd’s murder in 2020.

The city also must pay an additional $500,000 to a fund that will provide both counseling to targets of police violence and also community-led programming in the aftermath of police violence and misconduct.

Additionally, Philadelphia must disengage from the federal program which arms state and local law enforcement with military weapons and equipment, and meet every six months with the West Philadelphia community to present data around the police department’s use of force and to respond to questions and comments from residents.

ALC staff attorney Nia Holston noted, “This landmark settlement provides a singular opportunity for the City to reflect upon the harm it enacted on its residents on that day, harm that echoed Philadelphia’s own history of racism and discriminatory infliction of violence. It is only through the work of the community and the movements that have pushed this city to do better, that we progress to a more just Philadelphia for all who inhabit it. The settlement not only compensates those who were targeted, but provides further opportunity to residents to heal and to continue their work.”

Get more details, plus press coverage and video of the press conference announcing the settlement.


ENDING PROBATION-RELATED DETENTION

ALC and Civil Rights Corps attorneys outside federal courthouse in Pittsburgh

Our staff presented a persuasive argument at a preliminary injunction hearing in April in federal court in Pittsburgh, in our class action suit (co-counseled with Civil Rights Corps) alleging that Allegheny County’s pervasive incarceration of people awaiting hearings for alleged probation violations is unconstitutional.

This issue is vital to our community and our movement: more than 40% of people in Allegheny County Jail are currently being held on probation detainers, and a favorable decision would have major ramifications for pre-trial incarceration throughout Pennsylvania and beyond.

The expertly constructed presentation by ALC staff attorney Dolly Prabhu included powerful plaintiff and witness testimony by ALC’s Court Watch founding director and current Movement Building Director Autumn Redcross and and volunteer court watcher Emma Fenstermaker, coupled with extensive data collected by our court watchers who’ve observed hundreds of probation hearings, and analyzed by top-notch ALC intern Lolo Serrano.

This case perfectly illustrates how we combine our Court Watch program and other grassroots mobilizations with movement-lawyering to build innovative and effective challenges to the carceral state.


SHOWING UP FOR OUR COMMUNITIES

flyer of Ecology of Mass Incarceration Event at Carnegie Mellon University

Among many other activities in communities across Pennsylvania this spring, we’ve challenged the prioritization of county-wide resources, celebrated the queer community in spaces like Pride events, and presented at public programs on a wide range of topics including the Ecology of Mass Incarceration, human rights violations in U.S. jails and prisons, and policing the police.

In greater Pittsburgh we’re continuing to focus the majority of our litigation and organizing on the extreme injustices and abuses happening in the criminal courts and the county jail. Our organizers, legal team, and volunteers remain engaged on many fronts, including establishing a vocal and visible presence at Jail Oversight Board meetings, and advocating on behalf of incarcerated people and their loved ones, who are trapped in atrocious conditions.

ALC’s Court Watch program recently partnered with Point Park University psychology students who conducted ethnographic observations of Allegheny County’s mental health court as part of an advocacy-focused research project. As one participant noted in this article in the Wellsboro Gazette, “This experience showed me the type of community activism that needs to be done. If we don’t have people going to courtrooms to see what is happening and talk about it, then nothing will change, and the people in difficult positions may never have the chance to actually get help.” To explore how you can take an active role through court watching or court packing, sign-up for one of our upcoming Courtwatch Orientations here.

In Philadelphia, we remain hard at work on an effort to establish a board to oversee the city’s jails, where people experience truly dire conditions. We’re aiming to create an independent civilian body whose members will include formerly incarcerated people and their loved ones who are the experts on Philly’s carceral system. This oversight group will have the power to investigate abuses, audit prison practices and policies, and have full access to the facilities to create oversight, transparency, and accountability where there is none currently.

To learn more about the effort to address the human rights disaster in Philly jails,
join us for this upcoming event:


Philly Incarceration Crisis: Virtual Town Hall

Too many deaths, too much violence, too many held in inhumane conditions, too many excuses!

Join us on Tuesday, June 27 at 6pm
to discuss the Philly incarceration crisis and how you can get involved.
Registration required. Sign up here. 


FROM VICTIM TO VICTOR

“Deserving of a Second Chance”
by Megan Lentz

In mid April, in collaboration with Let’s Get Free and the Human Rights Coalition, ALC released our newest report: From Victim to Victor: An Inquiry into Death by Incarceration, Gender, and Resistance in Pennsylvania with a press conference at the William Way LGBTQ Community Center in Philadelphia.

As the first ever in-depth report examining the gendered experience of Death by Incarceration (life without parole) in Pennsylvania, From Victim to Victor exposes the overwhelmingly common yet vastly overlooked threads woven through the direct experiences of women and trans people sentenced to die in prison.

“I’d like to express how psychologically deafening it is to be rehabilitated, take full responsibility for your crimes, have meaningful goals and assets to offer to society, be called a role model, yet denied a second chance to become a taxpayer, instead of a costly tax burden within society… I pray for the day I’m afforded at least a chance to see the parole board. Even Charles Manson was afforded this gift.” – Jennifer Rhodes, in her speech at the press conference

Dig deeper here, download  the report, find press coverage in Truthout and the Pittsburgh City Paper, and more.


SAVE THE DATE FOR OUR 10th ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION!

Graphic to Save the Date Celebrating ALC 10th Anniversary

Ten years ago, two attorneys founded the Abolitionist Law Center with one client, political prisoner and former Black Liberation Army member Russell Maroon Shoatz. Today ALC is both a public interest law firm and a community organizing project, has nearly 20 staffers, offices in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and a portfolio of work that by some estimates impacted close to 70,000 people last year.

As we blast into our second decade, we’re wielding litigation, pressure campaigns, and public education. We’re centering and mobilizing affected communities. We’re targeting every point on the criminal punishment conveyor belt, including policing, the courts, jails and prisons, and other forms of correctional control.

This urgent, challenging, and often life-and-death work can be very heavy. But there’s a lot to celebrate, too.

Save the date and plan to join us on the evening of September 20th for a festive, community-centered commemoration of this milestone at the World Cafe Live in Philadelphia, and look out for more details coming soon about this event and other anniversary programming.


DONATE TO DECARCERATE

Help us sustain the fight to free people from incarceration and other forms of racist state violence by making a tax-deductible donation to the Abolitionist Law Center today.

Your gift fuels our collective liberation struggle and powers the transformative change we’re fighting for in the courts, in the streets, behind bars, and on the outside.

We need your partnership to keep the pressure on, and we appreciate your contribution of any amount today. There’s so much more for us to do together!

Contributions to the Abolitionist Law Center, a 501(c)(3) organization, are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law.


No Police. Statement from ALC, 04-22-2021

This verdict is not about “justice.” This verdict is not about “accountability.”

This verdict is a testament to the political force of the masses, of colonized peoples, in the face of state-sanctioned terror.

It’s about making it known to all cops trembling in their boots, “You are not welcome here.”

But our challenge is not to pursue the conviction of one racist cop. Our challenge is to carry out the total dissolution of police and racial capitalism — to manifest the unfinished project of absolute freedom, to sustain and live out Abolition.

As you read this, the National Guard has set up checkpoints across US cities. State legislation has been proposed around the country — and signed into law in the case of Florida — to criminalize Black grief, Black Power, and allyship; to make it legal for white supremacists to use their vehicles as weapons to run over and kill protesters; to make it illegal for local governments to defund their police departments; to ultimately make Black protest a felony and deprive bail to those charged.

In the same week that Daunte Wright was murdered by officer Potter, in the same week the Chicago Police released body cam footage of the killing of 7th-grader Adam Toledo, the Biden-Harris Administration chose to abandon their campaign pledge to create a police oversight commission.

In Brooklyn Center, MN, hundreds of community members have been rounded up by the police and detained for days without charges, without ability to post bail, without access to lawyers. Journalists have been corralled, lined up, photographed, and driven miles from protests, unable to document the scenes of resistance to ongoing police terror.

This is not hyperbolic, this is America.

Moments before the jury declared Chauvin guilty of all charges for the murder of George Floyd, Columbus, OH police lynched 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant. Her death, and the deaths of so many others, are a brutal reminder that our current system will never deliver us justice, and that anything resembling such is a mere scrap intended only for extending the life span of our apartheid policing system.

We are reminded that police will continue to occupy the entrance to the prison-industrial complex. They will continue to serve white supremacy and capitalism. We have no tears for Chauvin and other agents of the State who are fearful of conviction. They should be.

Politicians and police apologists of the professional managerial class will continue to co-opt righteous Black Rebellion and capitalize on Black death, neutralizing the struggle for self-determination. They will call for “peace,” “calm,” and “independent investigations” — and funnel millions of dollars into task forces, trainings, superficial restructuring, and PR stunts. Just as they did in 2020, they are working to humanize a racist, fascist system and those who wear its shiny badge and thin blue line.

Almost one year since the George Floyd Rebellion, we maintain our position: abolition is our only way out. Abolish the police.

We do not seek a more “diverse” and “inclusive” technopolice state that will continue to openly hunt and slaughter Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, maim and kidnap protestors, medics, and journalists, and surveil and brutalize sex workers, immigrants, and community members who are disabled, queer, trans, or houseless. We do not want nicer slave patrols.

We seek the demise of police in their entirety. We know that “justice” will never be fully realized from the colonizer’s courtroom, that the verdicts from every previous trial have not stopped cops from killing with impunity. Our governments encourage them to do so.

Would Chauvin’s guilty verdict have been possible, without the threat of another rebellion hanging over the proceedings? Would the prosecutor have put on the same kind of case? Would the chief of police’s testimony have been completely different — would he even have testified at all?

These questions undoubtedly suggest that Black Rebellion and year-long, sustained organizing by Black and brown militants and allies forced the State to make a concession.

But at what cost?

Our friends and family members, and thousands of people were brutalized by the State during last summer’s rebellions and protests. They have been surveilled and kidnapped by the FBI, they have been placed on house arrest or are in prison, they are facing charges and living with permanent brain injuries, maimed bodies, and PTSD. Several community members have been killed by white supremacist vigilantes who openly coordinate with police.

People who have led the fight for Black Liberation during its sharpest inflections, have sustained incredible harms in doing so. It is our duty as abolitionists to support them, learn from them, and build with them. They are not forgotten.

We are living in the outgrowths of chattel slavery, in apartheid cities — but state terror and racial capitalism is not our fate. Our mentors and ancestors have reminded us of this time and time again: from the burning of the plantations to the hunger strikes of the prison cells, from the Amistad mutiny and swamps of the Maroons, from the armed cop watches and unconditional sharing of food, medicine, shelter, knowledge, love, and power that have defined abolitionist projects since the beginning…we have been here before.

And we have kept our promise to fight for the safety and freedom of victims and survivors of police terror. We have kept our promise to meaningfully advance the movements to defund and abolish the police. We are committed to everlasting solidarity.

Since the George Floyd Rebellion, we have fought for protesters and bystanders in East Liberty, Pittsburgh, and for Black activists and residents of West Philadelphia. We have revealed the development and maintenance of racial apartheid in Allegheny County, PA analyzing arrests by police and the use of cash bail by judges. We have organized with community groups, seeking the urgent release of all Black Political Prisoners, the abolition of the FOP, and permanent removal of all statues and symbols of state violence. We have published a report on the war on Black Pittsburgh, financed by bloated police budgets and normalized through excessive force, traumatization, and incarceration of Black residents — especially Black children. We’ve been part of countless panels and community forums and have offered alternatives to policing and punishment. We have hosted transformative justice workshops and teach-ins, and issued recommendations to lawmakers that seek unconditional pre-trial freedom for our community members who have endured the violence of arrest and detainment. We are building out the visions of collective care, safety, and harm reduction with our partners at the Alliance for Police Accountability and 1Hood.

We are actualizing abolition in real-time — with you — our friends and family members, our community members, those on the inside and the outside. We do this, when so much seems so impossible. In the words of Mariame Kaba, “We do this ’til we free us.”

ABOLITIONIST LAW CENTER

04/22/2021

POLICE TERROR at EAST LIBERTY PROTEST 06/01

Abolitionist Law Center posted this statement to Facebook on the June 2nd, in the early morning following the Pittsburgh Police’s violent descent upon peaceful protestors, terrorizing them with tear gas and excessive force in East Liberty. The post reached over 55,000 views and over 700 shares – aligning with the greater public’s eye-witness accounts of police terror and contradicting what the Pittsburgh Police had said during the news conference following the protest: that tear gas was NOT deployed.

Mayor Peduto’s office and the Citizen Police Review Board of Pittsburgh received countless complaints of police violence from protestors and bystanders who were brutalized, and those who had witnessed the use of tear gas, firing of bean bags, and violent arrests. In the afternoon of June 2nd, the Pittsburgh Police revealed that they had INDEED used tear gas – a chemical weapon banned in war – on peaceful protestors in the June 1 East Liberty protest.

Mayor Peduto has called for independent investigations into the police’s use of force on protestors supporting Black Liberation and police abolition in Pittsburgh.

WE ARE ABOLITIONISTS. Solidarity in the Struggle to End Police Terror and State Violence

“I may be doomed to the stake and the fire, or to the scaffold tree, but it is not in me to falter if I can promote the work of emancipation.”

– David Walker, 19th Century Radical Black Abolitionist

The Abolitionist Law Center extends our unqualified support to those in the struggle against police terror and state violence. We support the rights of our community members rising up in rebellion in the name of Black Liberation. At a time when the government cannot protect the health of the people in the US, when mass death is ravaging Black communities, while corporate and political elites seek an ever-larger sacrifice population to keep the profits flowing — we support revolt. We must become ungovernable if we are to transform the police and prison systems into something more than servants and instruments of racialized capitalism.

Police and prisons are the two core parts of a system of state violence that maintains a race and class order that derives from coercive capitalism and serves its interests. Police serve as the occupying troops that instill fear of and subordination to corporate and government interests, while jails and prisons then warehouse, stigmatize, traumatize, and disenfranchise those the police have removed from communities. The two together divide and dehumanize communities of color, keeping them disempowered, alienated, and ready serve as a standing reserve of labor. The violence inherent in their control is self-evident: sometimes it is graphic, as in the murders of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Tony McDade, or the physical abuse that the incarcerated suffer at the hands of prison staff; other times it is more hidden and quietly corrosive, as in the systemic use of surveillance in impoverished communities or the rampant use of solitary confinement in prison. Either way, the violence is obvious and unacceptable, and we support the efforts of Black communities, poor communities, people of color, immigrants, and queer people to resist it and demand an end to it.

We also know that another system is possible — that state violence is not inevitable and that racial capitalism is not our fate. We know that police forces were founded in the early industrial era to protect middle- and upper-class properties and businesses, while prisons were serving as dungeons and workhouses to dispose of the unwanted poor; we know that early law enforcement forces formed in the american south and the slave-holding north to terrorize enslaved African peoples, and track them down after they had escaped and sought their liberation. And we know that the idea of police and prisons as ‘protectors’ of the general community has only recently achieved consensus, and has done so by appealing to divisions between those who benefit from the racial-economic system by demonizing and disempowering those who do not. The entire contemporary assumption that agents of state violence are neutral entities that benefit the public good and mete out justice and accountability is a recent ideological smokescreen, and we support all efforts to highlight the race- and class-control of these systems and build a counter-consensus against the legitimacy of police and prisons.

We furthermore support the right to pursue these goals by any means necessary. The police and prison system in its current forms are so deeply woven into every level of our political systems, that asking for it to change will inevitably lead to superficial, empty changes and further divided communities. We support the right of people of color to bear arms to protect their lives in a society that does not value their lives, and we refuse to ignore a history that tried to keep arms only in white hands for so much of american historyWe also reject the current divisions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ police and ‘peaceful’ and ‘aggressive’ protestors, which both distract from the real problems and reinforce the false assumption that police have legitimate protective functions. In particular, we reject the ‘outside agitator’ trope that politicians of both parties reflexively deploy to diminish Black agency and try to discredit legitimate protest against unspeakable injustice. This same idea was used by slave states to blame northern agitators for slave rebellions, attempting to deflect from the brutality of slavery and the right of the enslaved to revolt. It was cynically used again when Black cities erupted in response to white supremacist violence in the 20th Century, as communists were blamed for agitation instead of the violent segregation that sparked the protests. During the Black urban rebellions of the 1960’s white hippies and counterculture figures were blamed for agitation. And in the 1992 Los Angeles Uprising,“gangs” and “looters” were to blame. The white antifascists and anarchists now blamed are only the latest way to deny the very real anger and frustration of years of oppression and create paranoia and division. We must be vigilant against these divisions and mythologies; we must keep our collective focus squarely on the violent state’s enforcement of racial capitalism that has produced these uprisings, decade after decade, and will continue to until we force a change to something better.

The change we look forward to and fight in the name of is one in which communities have no state-sponsored forces imposing and enforcing social control and coercion. In communities without police and prison systems, we see possibilities for those communities currently targeted by police to become more autonomous, less traumatized and more healed, and to find their own way out of poverty by taking back the resources formerly given to law enforcement. We see the possibility for communities strengthened by moving from a model of punishment to one of accountability and transformative justice — by shifting not just how we respond collectively to harm, but also to how we relate to one another and take collective care of each other.

Our movements have been working towards that goal for decades, and we follow in that tradition now by calling for a drastic reduction in the power and influence of the police. As a first move towards that, we call for the following steps to be taken immediately to reduce the damage caused by the policing system and correct some of its more flagrant wrongs:

  • Divert police funding to those in chronic poverty: Staffing for law enforcement makes up the largest single piece of most municipal and county budgets in Pennsylvania, and the majority of that money should be directed immediately to the relief of the over 1.5 million Pennsylvanians living in poverty. In Philadelphia, the most overpoliced and over-incarcerated part of the commonwealth, police staffing takes up a third of the payroll budget, in addition to millions of dollars spent on equipment, facilities, vehicles, etc; as much as possible of that money needs to go to the 400,000 Philadelphia residents — a quarter of the city’s population — living in chronic poverty.
  • Politically isolate and marginalize the Fraternal Order of Police, on the way to dissolving it entirely: The Fraternal Order of Police has a consistent and unequivocal history of using all its power to defend police brutality, including rampant sexual assault and domestic violence, and increase the capacity of the police to intimidate and control. Police unions are recent inventions that were established and gained power only in the mass policing and mass incarceration era, and, while they pose as unions, they serve primarily as political lobbies and ideological defenders of maximal police and incarceration power. We challenge their legitimacy in total, and as a first step, we demand that FOP locals be dissolved and their labor negotiating merged into the larger civil unions of Pennsylvania, until a time when the police are disbanded. We call on our labor allies to support us in disbanding a lobby that disguises its advocacy for terror of Black and Brown communities under the guise of a union, or else be held accountable for being on the wrong side of both labor history and that of the collective humanity of this state.
  • Make police contracts transparent and protect communities: contracts entered into with FOP locals must be negotiated in public, and negotiations must center stakeholders from impacted communities and their community control boards. There must be no tolerance for provisions protecting police for brutality, and no loopholes allowing reinstatements (or transfers) to police found to have engaged in direct violence. Furthermore, no labor contract or any other agreement negotiated with police needs to be honored absolutely; if police continue to act with wanton disregard for the lives and well-being of the people they are supposed to serve, the cities, counties, and community control boards, must suspend or dissolve those agreements.
  • Reduce police power by mass de-criminalization: Police power is granted by political authorities, and it can — and must — be taken away by political authorities. Local and county officials must reduce their jurisdiction greatly by decriminalizing possession of controlled substances and sex work, prohibit arrests for disorderly conduct, prohibit incarceration for misdemeanor offenses, and abolish probation. Arrests on these charges are overwhelmingly directed at the poor and minorities, and ending them would greatly cut down on law enforcement funding and activity. In turn, this would free up public funds to support programs and services in poor Black and brown communities.
  • Establish community control boards with full oversight: Community-based police control boards must be implemented throughout Pennsylvania: their members must come entirely from communities targeted by policing, and they must have full power to hire and fire officers, control city or county policing budgets, and oversee the entirety of law enforcement operations. Civilian police review boards in the past consistently have been deprived of efficacy due to the influence of police unions, politicians, and other entities and ideas invested in police-prison power. To prevent that, all members must have no stake in or financial ties to the police-prison complex (including anyone holding political office of any sort), and a majority of people on any board must have direct experience being targeted by police violence.
  • Provide amnesty, debt forgiveness, and expungement to all protestors: All charges brought against anybody for protesting or demonstrating in any manner must be dropped. Outstanding debt from court costs, fines, and fees must also be forgiven, and any criminal record resulting from those arrests must be expunged in toto

These are all campaigns we must wage and victories we can win on the way to police and prison abolition. We must continue to build solidarity, organize against the deeply entrenched ideas of police and prison legitimacy, and push on every level for a society that serves the interests of its people. Abolitionist politics are not a distant never-to-be-realized utopia: abolition is the act of organizing to end state violence and all systems of oppression. And it is an urgent project that cannot wait.

“When we revolt it’s not for a particular culture. We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.”

– Frantz Fanon


The Abolitionist Law Center has offices located in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. To contact us, please email pghpoliceabolition@alcenter.org (PGH) and phillypoliceabolition@alcenter.org (PHL).