Save the Kids and Affiliates Official Statement on Current Anti-Police Brutality Movement

Save the Kids Official Statement on Police Brutality on    Black America

 

SAVE THE KIDS AND AFFILIATES OFFICIAL STATEMENT ON CURRENT
ANTI-POLICE BRUTALITY MOVEMENT

DECEMBER 29, 2014

Save the Kids (STK) is a fully-volunteer national grass-roots organization with over ten chapters through the United States that is dedicated to the end of and alternatives to the incarceration of all youth and the school to prison pipeline. STK is further dedicated to racial justice and ending police brutality. The national board of STK is predominately comprised of People of Color and those who have been incarcerated. With the rise of a national movement fighting police brutality against Black America, STK is organizing rallies, protests, die-ins, teach-ins, concerts, benefit shows, public forums, juvenile detention and prison workshops, and community-building events. We call for the end of the current U.S. criminal and juvenile justice systems because they are based on punishment and retribution. Our suggestions for organizing, building community, and fostering alternatives are as follows:

1. The movement that arose out of Ferguson, Missouri against police brutality toward Black Americans and People of Color should be led by community organizers and activists who understand the long-term institutionalized effects of racism, although individuals of all identities are invited to join.

2. We want to impart education, solidarity, community, commitment, reflection, and action within the movement.

3. We want to encourage protests, die-ins, sit-ins, boycotts, rallies, marches, poetry slams, concerts, teach-ins, workshops, concerts, benefit shows, rallies, walkouts, and civil disobedience that have been happening around the country and the world against police brutality in the United States. We urge all people in the United States to utilize and defend their 1st Amendment right to speak out and assemble to end all forms of injustice and oppression at home and aboard.

4. We call not for the incarceration of police, which only supports the current system, but for other forms of community-based non-punitive justice. We promote prison abolition because prisons in the United States emerged out of slavery and are modern-day slave camps for corporations and the government, as stated in the 13th Amendment. The 13th Amendment states that slavery should only exist “… as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

5. We also call for the termination of police forces in their current militarized state of preparedness because officers are trained and educated within the police academy and criminal justice academic departments to violate, profile, criminalize, and use violent force to control society.

6. In place of punitive justice and violent police states, we suggest transformative justice, community accountability, and other holistic non-state, non-punitive, non-retributive, and non-authoritarian practices.

7. If groups and individuals are to promote reformist initiatives, the following are the reforms we suggest they support:

A. Any legislation that limits and impose a reduction on the militarization and police power, such as budget, resource and equipment and personnel, and program/department cuts.

B. Independent community police review boards.

C. Any legislation that allows more transparency of local, state, and federal law enforcement.

D. Proposals that disarm police and improve race relations and provide open authentic dialogue to improve community policing.

E. State, municipal, and federal funding to community based programs, such as juvenile detention alternatives initiatives, after school programs, prisoner re-entry, community health/wellness models, rehabilitation treatment, job readiness, GED and other education programs, youth empowerment and leadership initiatives, and conflict transformation and transformative justice programs in the community and schools.

PDF – Save the Kids and Affiliates Official Statement on Current Anti-Police Brutality Movement

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