Host: Othering and Belonging Institute, UC Berkeley
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Our communities know how brutal our police systems are and have been rising up to demand new visions of community safety and care. Less understood is the history and harms of reforms like community policing – a counter-revolutionary attempt to legitimize policing.
Militarized counterinsurgency and surveillance tactics are impacting neighborhoods daily. From housing displacement and gentrification to corporate power and incarceration, these systems are long-term strategies to increase police funding rather than invest in communities.
Watch a new video telling this story and hear from community leaders in Los Angeles about efforts to reclaim resources. How do we shift power to get what we need and deserve, to heal and thrive?
SPEAKERS:
Dylan Rodriguez
Dylan Rodríguez is a teacher, scholar, and collaborator who is committed to building and supporting abolitionist, liberationist, anti-colonial and other forms of radical community and movement. Since 2001, he has maintained a day job as a Professor at the University of California, Riverside. He was elected to serve as President of the American Studies Association in 2020-2021, and in 2020 was named to the inaugural class of Freedom Scholara. Since the late-1990s, he has participated as a founding member of organizations like Critical Resistance, the Abolition Collective, Critical Ethnic Studies Association, Cops Off Campus, Scholars for Social Justice, and Blackness Unbound, among others. Dylan is the author of three books, most recently White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logic of Racial Genocide (Fordham University Press, 2021), which won the 2022 Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. He was a co-editor of the field shaping text Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader (Duke University Press, 2016). Most importantly, Dylan appreciates participating in all forms of collective study, thought, and planning that build capacities to survive and revolt against oppressive conditions.
Pete White, Los Angeles Community Action Network
Pete White is the founder and co-executive director of the Los Angeles Community Action Network (LA CAN), a grassroots organization working to ensure the human right to housing, health and security are upheld in Los Angeles. Pete White has been a community organizer in Los Angeles communities since 1992 and has educated and organized thousands of low-income people on a multitude of issues and campaigns. A lifetime resident of South Central Los Angeles, he is committed to fighting for a Los Angeles that does not tolerate racial injustice, promotes an equitable distribution of resources, and includes everyone. White believes that organizing and leadership development are essential tools needed to achieve social change and racial justice. He serves on a variety of Boards and Advisory Committees related to homelessness, organizing, and grassroots funding.
Gloria Gonzalez, Youth Justice Coalition
Gloria is the Youth Development Coordinator at Youth Justice Coalition. As a Latina from South Central Los Angeles, life has provided her with the people, spaces, and resources to survive the struggle within my community. As a young mother, her passion revolves around youth development and building alternative opportunities for youth to end the cycle of the school to jail-track incarceration. She is motivated to work within the communities that have influenced and inspired her because of the abundance of incarcerated family and friends, and few resources in her community.
Youth Justice Coalition (YJC) is working to build a youth, family, and formerly and currently incarcerated people’s movement to challenge America’s addiction to incarceration and race, gender and class discrimination in Los Angeles County’s, California’s and the nation’s juvenile and criminal injustice systems.
Hamid Khan, Stop LAPD Spying
Hamid Khan is the co-leader of the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, a broad coalition whose primary goal is to raise public awareness, participation, mobilization, and action on police spying and surveillance and to sustain long-term intersectional movement building. Hamid immigrated to the United States from Pakistan in 1979. Hamid is also the founder and former Executive Director of South Asian Network (1990 – 2010) and a founding member of the Los Angeles Taxi Workers Alliance.
