Shrouded in Blue

You know, after the murder of George Floyd, we've begun as a nation to have a real mainstreamed conversation about police reform, that how could it be that with the eighteen hundred police departments around this country, that we could continue to refer to those that take the lies of unarmed black people as bad apples, that we could continue to shrug off the number of people that are murdered each and every day at the hands of people who took an oath and wear a badge that says to

protect and serve. The question collectively, finally, that we were having after the murder of George Floyd was who are the police there to protect? Who are they there to serve? Now, in the black community, we have known all too well.

It was the reason why the klu Klux Klan wore hoods because many of those same people that were attached to the quote unquote justice system were the very clansmen that were participating in the lynching, the beatings, and the hangings of innocent black people, but would serve as the police chiefs and the judges. We have a legacy in this country that has allowed white supremacy and violence to be shrouded in blue. We have created policies and systems that allow them to do harm without fear of any

persecution at all. When a police officer is actually convicted, we all exhale because we have been holding our brats throughout the entirety of the Chauvin case. Because even with the videos, the angles, the witnesses who broke down on the stand, who refuse to turn away because somebody needed to see what was being done, we didn't believe that the justice system would do the right thing, because it rarely ever does not when the victims are black or brown,

or poor for that matter. In her book Becoming Abolitionists Police Protests in the Pursuit of Freedom, Dereka Purnell unpacks her own journey to abolition to the belief that police and policing and police forces are nothing more than a polacebo. She writes, calling them felt like something, and something feels like everything when the other option seems like nothing. But there have been too many times when we have heard stories of people calling the police and death following that

phone call. Whether family members are calling the police because a loved one is in mental distress, because we have no other system, no other place to call. Yet we know, good God damn well that the police aren't trained to do a fucking thing, not as it pertains to the escalation. They can only seem to de escalate so long as

the person is wielding a weapon and is white. Because if God forbid, they have a book or a cell phone and happen to be black or brown, Well, you have just cemented certain death with the phone call to police. We have watched right in the videos of the many parents Amy Cooper, who knew just how to inflect her voice and dramatize her fear of a very dangerous bird watching black man in Central Park. We continue to hear stories of police officers using, time and time again the

good old rope. They seemed dangerous, I couldn't see, I'm under pressure, and I feared from my life. Well, what the fuck is your training for You're the one with the gun. Kim Potter right took out her taser or thought she did, Oh oops, it was my nine millimeter. There are so many names, so many names, and so many names that we will not know of those whose

lives were stone len by police. We just learned not too recently, right about the United States government dropping a bomb in nineteen eighty six folks in Philadelphia to take out black activists. Right, We just learned about that that it wasn't just the mobs of armed white supremacists that would destroy and murder hundreds of black people in Tulsa, Oklahoma. That just recently was referred to as a massacre for the first time by a sitting fucking president. But somebody

authorized the bombs that were dropping from overhead. Somebody authorized police not to give a fuck, right because they were participating. And that has been true through history. This is part of what Dereka Purnell states in becoming abolitionist. For more than a century, activists in the United States have tried to reform the police, from community policing initiatives to increasing diversity. None of it has stopped the police from killing about

three people a day. Think about that, Folks, in what position, in what industry, in what career could you have those type of incidents and there not be a significant fucking policy change and overhaul. But for the police, I don't know one. She goes on, Millions of people continued to protest police violence because these quote solutions do not match the problem. The police cannot be reformed. In becoming abolitionists, Dereka Purnell draws from her experiences as a lawyer, writer,

and organizer. Initially skeptical about police abolition, she details in this multiracial social movement rooted in rebellion, risk taking, and revolutionary love, how it pushed her and a generation of activists towards abolition. Now, if you remember, on the ballot this year was police abolition in Minneapolis, and it failed.

Activists who were for abolition will say that this failure right was indeed progress because it would be the first time, the first time, in all of the years and all of the decades fighting for police reform, that even the idea of abolition, which had finally penetrated the consciousness of the country, would even be considered as an option. But much in the same way that Fox News and the Republicans ride on fear. We do the same thing with policing.

Oh my god, if we get rid of the police, then rape will be up and murder will be up. And I'm like, we've had police since the beginning of time. You see, they were the slave troll They were the ones that made sure that those that were trying to escape to freedom never made it. And since we have had police, there's been a rise in all sorts of crime and murder and rape and persecute, all of these things. And the response has always been, oh, we need more police.

When have you ever heard of police stopping actual fucking crime as opposed to showing up after the fact. We have more incidents of people with special needs and disabilities being murdered by police when called because oh, they don't know what to do. But we have never created or put resources into any other initiatives or entities so that we take that task that clearly they cannot do away from armed officers. You know, it is a tangled web.

Our injustice system, our legal system, our police system just continuing to feed the beast. People in this country are addicted to the police because you have been lied to in thinking that their presence means your safety, when in fact, when we continue to look at the wealthiest places in this country, when we look at tree lined neighborhoods in the suburbs, you never see the police, you never hear a siren, and yet those are the safest areas. And

why is that? Oh, because their property taxes provide for them the better schools and the community centers and the country clubs and the sidewalks and everything that we know to be true create safe communities. But what do we continue to do in low income communities and black and brown communities. We flood them with police, but we don't provide supermarkets, we don't provide actual banks, we don't provide jobs, we don't provide schools that don't look like fucking prisons.

And then we wonder why there is crime, why there is distrust of the police, Because for the moment that you're able to get to school on your own, you're being thrown up against a police car and harassed. So Dereka Parnell's journey in becoming abolitionists is about looking across, as she would say, geography and time, looking at places from Ferguson to South Africa from reconstruction, as she writes to the contemporary police protests and shootings and say, what

does it really mean to be free? To get free? But we are so addicted to violence in this country that can't reform policing because we don't have the ability to imagine something better, something different. I can tell you that in all my years riding public transportation, whether it be the Metro in DC, or the subway in New York, or in whatever place that I am, anytime that I see a group of police officers either get on to a train car or b at a subway station, I

avoid them like the fucking plague. Nowhere have I ever seen a group of police officers gathered and thought to myself, oh, I feel safe. Any time that I've ever seen flashing lights behind me or go by me, my heart rate speeds up and breath leaves my body. That should not be the consistent feeling that black and brown people have in this country when they come face to face with police.

You shouldn't have one community have to tell their child a story about how to stay alive and think that you live in a system that is safe and for all people. We have believed the lie and what this conversation with Dereka Parnell offers is a way out. But will we ever be bold enough to get there? Will we ever actually vote for our own liberation from policing

and violence without accountability? Folks? I am so excited to welcome to wokaf Daily for the first time author Dereka Purnell, who is the author of a book whose title I just love, Becoming Abolitionists. Dereka, we have talked about abolition on woke a f in so many different forms, in so many different ways, about what it means to abolish something, what it means to purge it, right, And I think that in order to purge something you have to recognize it.

You have to recognize its ills, the troubles, the trauma, the grief that it is bringing. When we talked about abolitionists during slavery, we were, you know, abolishing a system of depravity, of cruelty, of horrifics treatment of human beings. When you wrote this book and you're and the title becoming Abolitionists, what does that mean to you? Oh? Wow? I love this question. I love the foreground and so the one. Thank you so much for having me I'm

very excited about this conversation. I went back and forth on titles. It was very hard trying to figure out which title made the most sense for this book. And the reason why I ultimately landed on becoming abolitionists with this plural sue is because to be an abolitionist, I believe, is to always be in the process of the journey and reevaluating what makes the most sense for the future

that we want to build. Right and so like the reasons why I was an abolitionist when I first started writing the book are very different than some of the things that I have right now. And it's just allowing yourself to be curious enough to ask questions, to be in a conversation with people, to be wrong sometime, to reflect to say, oh wow, I used to think this about myself. I used to think it's about the world.

I used to think this about police and prisons, And now with more information, I have new better reasons to not want the police to be here, or I have new better reasons why, well, I don't think that we should have prisons in this society. And so in the book, I try to show that journey for me, but also for other people right ten twelve years ago, I guess ten years ago, Oh my gosh, ten years ago, about ten years ago when George Immerman killed Treymon and Martin.

There are so many of us who were fighting, spending hours, sacrificing, you know, our work, our families, our school to make sure that someone was arrested. That is what we put that energy in. And there are so many of those people who were at the forefront of those movements who now don't even believe in arrests, don't even believe in prisons, don't even believe in police. And I wanted to talk about that because when people critique abolitionists, they'll say something like, well,

you know, this isn't realistic. When we tried realistic thing. We have spent our lives learning about the realistic way you're supposed to hold someone accountabile, accountable. And now that we know that those systems were never intended to actually offer true justice, true accountability, and so we're constantly becoming examining what kinds of systems that we want to abolish

and then what we also want to build. You know, I love that one because I think that the journey that your book lays out is the journey that many of us are on right, where we wanted to believe in a criminal justice system, in a judicial system that was going to see our full humanity, that was going to actually uphold the creed that justice is in fact blind. Right.

I think that from two thousand and what was it, two thousand and fourteen until now, right, the amount of hashtags, the amount out of unarmed black people that have been murdered, the video of nine minutes of George Floyd losing his losing having the life squeezed out of him, not losing

his life, having his life stolen from him. You know, I wanted to believe in the beginning when we saw Trey Von Martin to your point that there's no doubt this is a child, right, this was an adult, and so we know that he will be convicted because how could he not. And it was in that moment for me that I just I the faith that I had in our politics, in our government, in our systems began

to wane. And I want to talk to you about these different pinpointed moments because you also lay out very clearly where you grew up right, the neighborhoods and how they were filled with various forms of violence, whether you're talking about environmental injustice factors or you're talking about actual crime or the lack of jobs, and you know, good

schools and hopefulness. What are those kind of pinpoint moments that stand out for you over this timeline of moving from believing in the probability that a policing system could work for black people and then understanding that it was never meant to yes. Yes. So I would say that early on rather than saying that I like believe that

this system weren't for us. I think now, having readen the Bug and read it like a thousand times while all the edits, I think it was probably the most accurate thing for me to say is that I had really unexamined ideas about policing. Right, I had unexamined ideas about my own commitments to policing. I just assume that they were here. I didn't ask they came from. I didn't ask if we needed them. It was just like, oh, police kind of exist, like male people exists, like fire

five or six, like teacher. They're just they're just a part of society. I didn't even have wherewithal I knew that there were problematic police. I knew that there were police with my mom's friends, right, there was a range of and there sometimes there was an overlap, and that has been diagram But you know, I just took for

granted their existence. I really had unexamined commitments to these institutions, and so over time, especially when Michael Brown was killed, that was one of the first times I started being pushed to acts okay, like what is this thing about? Like why why is this? Why can't cops just kill someone and kind of like go home. It was very It was a very huge political awakening for me and

lots of other people. And what I also realized I was doing at that time long alongside lots of other people, I was using what white people get, or at least what I perceived white people to receive as justice, as

a metric for what I thought we deserved too. So I would say something this happened to a white boy, like we already know this black hot would be in jail, and we don't even have to guess because Mohammed nor in Minnesota end up killing I think Justine Diamond, the white woman from Australia, he's in prison, right so we would say, you know, if this was a white person, this is what would happened. This is a white person,

this is what would happen. And at some point, by being in conversation with other organizers doing more study and doing more research learning about the origins of police, I have to be like, Wade, what if this system that we know is racially unjust? What if it's also not working for white people? And we're fighting to get what white people will have. We're fighting that white people think, And it's just like, what if what if we get what white people get? Will that then mean that few

of black people would die? And I don't think that's true because white people kill our police all the time, and I just don't want cops to go to prison after they kill us. I want the killings to stop. I wanted the violence to stop. And so it just completely disrupted my noses of justice and fairness and equity and I had to let go of that metric. I had to ask, is it unfair that we don't have it? Yes? But does it mean that it's real justice if we get it? And that answer was not clear to me.

You know that is so illuminating because I think that we spend a lot of times comparing comparing ourselves, right, comparing what it is that black people don't have versus what it is that white people have. The fact is is that because we have qualified immunity in this country, because you can just be a cop and you can fear for your life regardless of who is in front of you, kill them and then go home, is in

fact the problem right and right now. Now, you know, just last week we had, after eight months of supposed deliberation and back and forth between you know, a Senator Corey Booker and Senator Tim Scott, they want to come out and be like, Nope, the gap is too large

for us to do anything about policing reform. So this moment of George Floyd having his life squeeze out of him for nine minutes that we all watched together, they want to tell us after eight months, well, we just can't do anything, so we stay with the status quo or devolve even worse into the place that we are. What does that feel like? How did that feel to you?

Do you know what I'm saying? Like? After we all witnessed this collectively in the midst of quarantine, where we are all glued to our devices, glued to our television and witnessed this collective horror together. And now eight months later they tell us that what we thought was the spark of some thing new is now it's just too big to do. Yeah. So I felt I think two immediate things. The first thing that I felt was immediately sympathy for George Floyd's family, because, you know, Joe Biden

had promised them I'm gonna champion police reform. I intend to keep that promise. I got you, We're gonna name this after George Floyd. We're gonna, you know, put you on front stage at the Democratic National Convention. We're gonna rally him. He was doing all of this while also still promising to give more money to police, but he you ultimately did. So he's walking this fide. You know, we're gonna achieve real justice and policing that everyone can enjoy,

and I'm gonna give more money to the police. Okay. So I felt horrible for George Floyd's family to have that hope. To think that someone you're campaigning for, your trying to get them in office, you're on college trying to get policy passed. It hurts to think what that family is going going through right now. The second the second thing that I felt, how can I just what's the most honest way to say this. It's not that I was not surprised, It's not that I felt let down.

Because when the George Floyd Act was initially introduced, I wrote in my column and I completely just I just completely disagree with everything about that bill. So here we have a policing bill that I argue wouldn't have even saved George Floyd's life, right you know, Derek Chauvin was called. Police were called because over an alleged use of a counterfeit twenty dollars bill, which is illegal, and if he used it, it is illegal, and cops have a constitutional

power to stop people who's using counterfeit money. You can go to jail right now, people watch that is just like man over twenty dollars, over twenty dollars. Counterfeit twenty dollars bills are an important currency for people who are economically and exploited. And we're in a session job crises, eviction crises. What could have actually helped people like George Floyd, people like my mom, people in our communities was resources,

more stimulus, actual money. And so if the couple would have just came and arrested George Floyd took in the jail, there would have been no uprisings, no protests, they would have been no like And that's what happens every single day. So when I read this bill, I was just like the way, at the end of the day, what the actual problem was was, you know, people working class people,

black people living on twenty dollars, counterfeit exchanges. Being police now has become a way to give police more money, to do more training, to restrict chokeholds. Well, what about the poor? Why don't we give them more money to people? Why don't we give them more money to police? And at the end of the day, I called it in that piece and I called it in this piece around a couple of days ago. Whenever these reforms get you know,

they go on tour. What ultimately happens, police get more money until the next viral police killing and all the reforms that don't even work get put off to the side, and three people are still killed every day by police. And so it's frustrating that people have to be like, man, I really have hope in this bill. I really have hope in this policy, and I didn't have any hope and it was quite bad, actually, right, it was pretty bad. And then it's just like, well, now what now? What

do you do? So reform isn't a realistic option, like and now he's abolist is not realistic? Reform is not realistic. You know, it's funny because I have been moving myself towards a place where I'm like, I don't even want to use the terms reform or reimagine, because you're reimagining something that is broken, right, Like you how do you reform something? How do you reform a leg that's been amputated? You don't, right, Like, you need to create something different.

And I think for me that's why abolition in and of itself feels right, because it is the most honest thing because if you want to, if you want to create a new system, you don't do so off of what is broken, right. You have to abolish what is

what is present in order to create something new. And I feel like that's that's where the energy needs to be placed, which is that it's not enough to just say, oh, we're going to reform, We're gonna reimagine, we're going to reassess, and we're gonna do all of these things, which is pretty much playing three card monte with people's lives. You're just moving the cards around the table and you're not actually doing anything. It's a bullshit magic trick, right, that

doesn't produce that doesn't produce anything. Um, when when you hear the pushback when people talked about defund the police, right and folks had said, you know, we should we shouldn't say defund, And to your point, at various points in the book, you're like, you know, if if we're not, if we're if we're if we're talking about reallocation of funds, Like then that's the conversation that that's what I have said, if we're if defund the police is really talking about

a reallocation of funds to stop having where I sit in New York City, a police department that has a budget of six billion dollars, Like when when you know what I'm saying, So it's like, it is that language. Should it be reallocation, should it be defund? Does it matter if if we're still again playing three card monte with our criminal justice and policing systems. Yeah, well, I

like defund the police for lots of reasons. One reason is because in twenty fourteen, when Black Lives Matter took off as a hashtag, people said black lives matter was divisive, like it's polarizing. All lives matter. I mean a lot of people didn't say that, not in good faith. It's like, what, we'll be on board with police not killing black people,

but he said black lives matter, So I can't. I can't even get It's like, come on, like seriously, so if something's black lives matter, it's polarizing that they just matter. Like it's like the floor the bar is so low, like it's so solo. Right. The second thing I noticed around Black Lives Matter is that anyone, once it became more palatable, anyone could kind of say black lives matter and it not really need anything that much anymore. You

can say black lives matter to defund the police. You can say black lives matter to give more fundy to the police and say black communities want this. Sacks fifth Avenue was saying black lives matter. Everyone was just sort of saying black lives matter. But guess what black lives kept dying, right, black people being killed. What's interesting about defund the police is that it's a specific policy demand. It's like, take money away from the police. It's much

harder to then just co op something like that. Right. I'm not saying it can't be done, because I've seen it attempted be them. But it's different. It's not as soft as Black lives matter for lack of a better phrase right now, And so that's another thing. The third thing I would say is that any fight towards freedom and justice has always used unpopular language at the time of the fight, and then thirty forty fifty years from now, what do we do We say? Man, I'm so happy

that they march for civil rights. Do you know what it was like to say that you were marching for civil rights in nineteen fifties civil rights? Oh, you must be a criminal, you're a troublemaker, as if they call MLK. You know, it's to say that you wanted women to be able to vote. It's imagine a man in the early nineteen hundred saying whoa, whoa, whoa. I would be on board with women voting, but I don't like the

words suffrage. Like this age what we're doing when you say right, if the phrase it's seriously the barrier, then let's figure out how to explain what the phrase means. But I imagine I would have guessed at the people who actually don't like the phrase, most of them, not all of them. I've met a couple of people have really interesting critical arguments and defund the police and abolition right, and they are coming from a socialist analysis. They say,

how do we build a broad basis? People who probably agree with what you're saying but don't understand what it means. But they are committed to explaining what it means, right, which is different than I would get on board, but I don't like the language. So you gotta let police continue to kill three people a day because of a marketing campaign, Well, help us think about, you know, creative

language and creative ways to explain what abolition is. And so part of that is on abolitionists when we say abolition. When I say abolition, I mean we need to dismantle, eradicate, reduce the reasons why people need police, and we need to eradicate the institution of policing, and we need to eradicate the violence in society. That make people feel that they need police. It's both at the same time, and

it's over time. Right. So if that's on us to do that, what society what people who don't know what that means. It's also on them to ask questions, to be curious, to critically engage the faith, to read to you know, to ask it's it requires both of that. But if you are not even open to having a conversation because of a term you don't understand, I think that's quite unfortunate. And I think there are a lot of resources I hate to learn more about what that means.

I appreciate that so very much because I think you know too. One of the lies that we continue to tell in our society with regard to policing is that

more police equals more safety. Oh yeah. And the thing that I have been saying on woke f you know, interviews with former police chiefs, interviews with abolitionists, activists like yourself, is the fact that any I grew up in a very white suburb of New York on Long Island, and I will tell you that I never saw a police officer ever, right, Like, that was not a part of my data to if I did maybe they were, you know,

driving past on you know, on the main strip. What I did see were clean sidewalks, tree line streets, gated communities, country clubs, and resource centers and libraries and all of

these things. And so, you know, one of the questions that another question that I have for you is how do we break that lie that gas alight about the fact that when we're talking about defund the police, that there's this association, well, oh, you don't want to be safe, And I'm like, some of the safest neighborhoods have no police presence. What are you talking about? What they do have a resources and access? Absolutely yes, So that's and

the inverse is also true. Right if you look at where I grew up in Saint Louis, I did not grew up in the community in tree line streets. It was very much, very very much the hood still is the hood. We haven't had a grocery store since two thousand, the year two thousand. Not a grocery store, not a fruit market, not a community garden in sight, no health clinics, no jobs because the highway ripped apart the most prosperous place where black people were employed by a black businesses

ripped all those homes. Community business has gone, so people could commute from the suburbs to downtown Saint Louis to work, right, And so you look at a community like that, We look at Chicago, you look at DC where I'm sitting right now, in northwest, super high rates of like violent crime, also among the highest per capital rates of police. And so the police presence also doesn't reduce the violence that

people fear. It's just not. And every time, like right now, we're experienced a murder hike, probably because we're in the pandemic. People are stressed out, there are fewer jobs, there's an eviction ais that's happening. There's so much precarity that leads people to more vulnerable situations. And when there's precarity and vulnerability and a pandemic, there's violence. Like we know, the

researchers know this, scientists know this. But then you read the New York Times, you read mainstream outlets, and it's like, y'all want to defund the police while there's a murder spike right now, Well tell me why with a million cops in those places, especially in Chicago, Saint Louis, Detroit, DC, these neighborhoods, there's more police than anywhere else you have, the murder rate is still climbing. It's yeah, so more

police doesn't even equate to more in safety. What it feels like, it feels like, okay, at least somebody's here to do something. But it's not until cops are standing outside of people's homes every night, guarding and stopping violence. That's not what's happening, right, So it's it's yeah, it's the inverse is not you as well. So it's like, well, what actually keeps people safe? You no resources, strong social networks and patient jobs, you know, pushing back on racism, homophobia, transphobia.

You know. The one of the main reasons why people even kill people in the first place is because usually men want to control the sexuality of their partners. That leads to violence because you've been conditioning to patriarchy. Another reason why people end up killing each other is because of petty arguments and usually as men, something said and assulted, but I have an idea of what a man should be. Police can't stop patriarchy. They can't fix patriarchy, so they

can't get to the root problem of solving harm. You know, people join like street games for protection, and then if you arrest people who are carrying a gun on them for protection and because they're no jobs, like none of that stuff is not our communities. And then they go to jail, they come out, they have a record. It's gonna be even harder for them to get a job, harder for them to get in school, harder for them to get housing. So they're going to retreat to the

place where they feel most safe. It's like, how do we support all of those people? How do we fight for broad sweeping changes so that people can be empower and have self determination to work in jobs where they have dignity right where they have choices, where they have childcare and healthcare and tuition. It like, it's all of those answers are there, and it's actually much cheaper to just fund police who primarily recruited from the working class

to police other working class people. It's really really bad. Well, I will say this, Ica, is that I believe that your book is incredibly important and important in this particular moment that we are living in, and I hope that everyone picks up becoming abolitionists and thinks about that word thinks about that action and why it matters, and instead of just shrugging off phrases like defund the police or phrases like the black Lives Matter, phrases like you know

abolition that you actually begin to understand and hack why we are saying those things now and why they matter. Dereka Purnell, I wish you the best of success with your book, Becoming Abolitionists, and I hope that you will join us again when you finish your successful tour, because I would love to have you back. Yes, please have me. I really enjoyed this. Thank you for all of you, our kindness and your thoughtful question. I really appreciate it,

appreciate you. Thank you. That is it for me today. Folks on woke f as always, Power to the people and to all the people. Power, Get woke and stay woke as fuck.