Reform

I used to believe in reform.

When I was first awoken to police violence against Black people as a teenager. I thought, just take their guns away. Then two men in my town died from being tased to death.  That memory rises up as the weight between a gun and a taser is calculated. As if we could reduce deadly force to ounces.

I used to persist, that if we just protested enough, if we pushed the right people forward, changed the right policies. Then perhaps policing wouldn’t mean genocide.

My childish hope met the fantasy of whiteness. My own safety lulling me into pretend solutions. Although I feared authority, a remnant of my own trauma and experiences, I was sure if law enforcement can be so invisible, so accommodating in my childhood neighborhood. It must be possible to train them into behaving that way all the time. Right?

Something I wouldn’t dare to speak but wiggled its way through my young brain. Seducing me into reform. Justice, the heroic retribution of a court trial. “no justice, no peace”

But experience has a way of destroying illusion. Protest after protest against police violence, racial violence, seeing the same thing over and over. An endless stream of officers who murdered, returning to the force. New reforms implemented. Just to be manipulated in new ways.

With more lost souls soaking the air.

Every time I hear ‘we need more training’, my heart sinks. By most accounts, a reasonable reform. Lets make officers into the de-escalators we pretend they are. We can create the officer friendly of our imaginations!

Forgetting the pages and pages of manuals on how to abuse a citizen, how to skirt around rights violations. Armies of officers lined up against the hostile territory on “the other side of the tracks”. Or would we be happier if they just stuck to collecting revenue for the state, excessive ticketing like we saw in Missouri, imprisoning people who are unable to pay, a debtors prison. Is this a reasonable reform? No more murders just a stream of labor and income that still separates us from them.

I’m tired of memorial protests. Of grief and anger and fear swirled together, a punctuation of emotion. And the offering of an individual sacrifice, Kim Potter resigning, or the trial of Derek Chauvin. These individuals trotted out like victories. As if any one individual could change the nature of policing. When Philadro Castile, George Floyd, and Daunte Wright were all murdered within miles of each other. Philadro’s girlfriend, Diamond Reynolds, screams are still seared into my body as she desperately tried to sooth her child after watching the man she loved murdered.

There is no individual trial, sentencing, or settlement that will right these wrongs.

So no, I don’t believe in reform.

There are moments over the last year, when I see a profound hope. When I feel the ground swell with determination, with a community minded mentality, with the desire to care for and support each other. Pushing against the dry cracking skin of what has been.

I reach for that hope daily. The reminder of what is coming, what can be.

My prayer today is that we not settle. That we refuse individual solutions to a nation wide issue. That we are honest; policing in America is genocide and there is no resolution without the dissolution of policing. I pray that our anger and grief may become a well-tended fire, that we may fight, that we may continue to pass this torch, until we reach abolition.