Crowd-source made tools for emailing government officials to reallocate police budgets towards education, social services, and dismantling racial inequality. Source code available for each site/effort …

defund12.org listing by state, here is NYC, and here is the source code – github.com/defund12/defund12.org

Next up, NYC specific, on glitch.me: To see your city council member’s position on defunding the NYPD, enter your address or select your district … defund-nypd-reps.glitch.me, source code – github.com/rolandcrosby/defund-nypd-reps, and data source – bit.ly/defundtracker

From our team …

…two informative (resources) that touch on defunding law enforcement. The first, Locking Up Black Dissidents and Punishing the Poor: The Roots of Mass Incarceration in the US, discusses the criminalization of Black and Latinx people from the 1960’s to present-day. The second, Are Prisons Obsolete? by Angela Davis argues against the need for the prison system, it’s relationship to racism and slavery, the criminalization of poor people, and how to move forward as a society without them.

A big part of understanding the current protests is examining the relationship between the country’s Black people and the police/prison system. The criminalization of Black existence post-slavery, how it affects laws, why poverty and survival is criminalized, and how these laws criminalize Black people, Latinxs, Asian-Americans, Native Americans, and poor white people affects everyone regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexuality, or religious affiliation. The idea of defunding and abolition is not new and has been argued for decades. Whether you agree with abolition or not, we must understand that the discussion of Black Lives Matter and police brutality is about dismantling systemic violence that affects us all. I hope these readings serve as a stepping-stone to understanding what we can do to change a system that is clearly broken.