Racial Profiling Hearing Set for May 5

I hope a lot of people will turn out for the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing of the bill to curb racial profiling.  We are, in some ways, closer than ever to passage, and is some ways so far.  Prior to the House hearing there were hours and hours of negotiations between community members and the police about compromise language.  We went into the hearing with new wording we could all live with and all testified to that effect.  Several police speakers said that all the bill really is is a codifying of best practices. 

Then the bottom feel out.  The police chiefs association voted to oppose the bill, unanimously with two abstentions.  Not even close.  Not even those who had said publicly that they could live with it voting for it.

So not it is time for the legislature to act.  And they need to hear from you, because you can be sure that they will hear from their local police chiefs.  And going against them takes courage.  We need to ask the legislators to be courageous.

That is where you come in. 

If you have experienced racial profiling, we need you to say so.  Tell your story.  The legislators still don't quite believe how pervasive and how humiliating it is, in spite of the statistics.  They don't quite get how that anger and humiliation that result undermine the stated intent of the police to develop trust that is essential for good policing.  So please, tell them your experience.  If you can't be there, send it to sene@afsc.org and we will pass it on.

And if you are angered that people in our community are stopped for simply walking down the street or driving down the street, then your voice is needed as well.  We need people to say this is not the kind of community I want and I want the police to listen to us.

And we need to call on the legislators to insist that the police listen to the community.  We give the police an awful lot of latitude to decide how to go about the task of addressing crime and keeping our community safe.  There are trade offs we make for that safety.  And the police must listen when the community tells them that they have gone too far.  If they don't listen voluntarily, then the legislature must step in and pass a bill that at least some police professionals admit is only a statement of best practices.

Please join in this effort.  Thanks!

Call to the RI Legislature to pass bill curbing racial profiling

Testimony on H-5263, a bill to curtail racial profiling

Greetings and thank you for this opportunity to speak to you.  My name is Martha Yager.  I work for the American Friends Service Committee, South East New England office, a Quaker-based organization which works throughout Rhode Island and southern Massachusetts. 

Tonight we have heard from the various police units opposing this bill.  And we have heard powerful testimony from people in the community about why we need the bill.

I want to step back for a moment to think about the purpose of laws.  Laws are created to, at least in part, help us act as our better selves.  For instance we may have opposed individual violent revenge in response to crime, but when our loved one is murdered or harmed, it is only natural that the hurt and rage flames into an impulse to want to kill the person who killed our loved one.  The purpose of the law is to relieve the victim’s family of having to deal with that.  It says we as a community also believe that murder is wrong and we will create a judicial system that can hold people accountable for the harms they do and to protect society from any further harm.  It says that we understand your rage but you may not act on it and will act on your behalf.  In so doing it helps the victims family live the values they hold dear in a time of deep distress or, as a friend of mine whose dad was murdered right in front of him, to be their better selves.

Likewise we have decided together that racism and discrimination are not how we want to live as a society.  Yet we have a long history of racism in this country and it takes a long time to unlearn those attitudes and change our ways.  We also know that in spite of our best intentions, because we have grown up steeped in those ways, we sometimes will act in ways that discriminate or are hurtful.  We need laws and structures to hold us accountable to learning to behave differently, to help us become the community we want to be.

As I sat in the meeting with the police last week, listening to their justifications for why we don’t need this bill, and listening to the community explain the reality of racial profiling in our community, I realized that ultimately we all wanted the same thing.  We all want a safe community.  And we all know that there are people who cause harm who need to be stopped.  But the police, for a variety of reasons, choose a very narrow approach to creating safety that looks with suspicion and assumption of wrongdoing at everyone they encounter and that that lens is certainly shaped by the long history of racism even when they don’t want it to be.  And we have to acknowledge that there are some in the police community who are less committed to undoing racism and some who, for a variety of reasons, abuse their power and become accustomed to behaving in very intimidating ways.  The community experiences their efforts as being counterproductive and indeed creating less safety because of the experience of the rage that results from humiliation and the resultant lack of trust that is necessary for good policing.  The community is less safe when people are afraid to go to the police with concerns or fear they wont be taken seriously and the police themselves are less safe when people are enraged at how they have been treated. 

This bill, which curtails only some aspects of racial profiling, which has been significantly modified to meet the concerns of the police, and which some police find acceptable, is a tool to help us move toward having the safe community that we all say we want.  As one of the police pointed out the other day, it only holds them accountable to standards they already endorse, to their best practices.  The community needs the legislature to finally pass this legislation to help hold us all to some basic standards, to help move us to being a more just and safe community for all of us. 

One hundredth of 1 percent...

That’s the percentage of the United States Institute for Peace budget as compared to the Pentagon.

As a government funded agency, the institute has a critical role to play in seeking to instill principles of conflict prevention and diplomacy into structures of decision making that to often depend on military aid and military action to resolve conflict.

Anthony C. Zinni, a retired Marine general and commander in chief of the United States Central Command from 1997 to 2000, offers an unexpected (to some) defense of the institute.

Posted by Peter Lems on the AFSC blog, Afghanistan 101.  Check it out.  http://afghanistan101.blogspot.com/

Maybe We Can Do More

 Thanks to Greg Williams for these thoughts:

It was a strike of mostly Black sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Martin got there by accident.  A freak accident and bad working conditions got workers killed.  A strike was called. Martin was called but he was planning  a Poor People's Campaign, and he was tired.  SCLC would send some one...   They wanted Martin to stand with them and he did.  Today he would be standing with Unions again if he were here.  Just like 1968, in our world today there is a lot of unrest all over the place.

We should not be ignoring the signs of our time. If John Woolman could speak to us today, it would be to remind us that it is still the economy. Part of what Martin said the day before he died is:
"...The issue is injustice. The issue is the refusal of Memphis (or Wisconsin) to be fair and honest in its dealings with public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers.  Now, we've got to keep attention on that... Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness.  Let us stand with a greater determination.  And let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be.  We have an opportunity to make America a better nation."

So While there are interesting things happening in Egypt, the Middle East, and elsewhere,  we have a drama here that demands our attention as well.  We ought to be making noise as Quakers, as spiritual people, as men and women interested in Justice. I find it interesting that folks from Egypt and elsewhere are sending Pizza to demonstrators here in the United States.  They understand the links and are reaching out in support.  We can send pizza as well,  but maybe...we ought to do more? This ought to be a buzz on facebook, a buzz in letter to the editors, a buzz to City Councilors, State Reps. and up the chain to  President Obama..

If we fail to act on this concern today it will be back tomorrow in greater force.  CUT THE WAR BUDGET SEND THE MONEY HOME TO OUR STATES!  The one thing we can"t afford to do is ...nothing.

Budget Math Doesn't Add Up

Opinion: This Budget Cutting Math Doesn’t Add Up
By Robin Aura Kanegis
Philadelphia Inquirer Feb. 15, 2011
It’s simple math: A military budget that has doubled in twelve years + worries about the resulting deficit = deep cuts to military spending.
Yet in a display of backward logic, the House majority’s initial announcement of planned cuts to current spending only included cuts to non-military discretionary spending, the spending that helps invest in our communities, schools, and our economic infrastructure. It seems the Pentagon has developed the ultimate cloaking mechanism -- to protect military budget bloat from mathematical reality.
The US military budget currently accounts for over half of our discretionary budget -- and nearly half of all military spending the world over.
Despite this incredibly lop-sided investment, increased military appropriations are set to glide past Congressional “budget hawks” like Harry Potter in his invisibility cloak. Meanwhile the fragments of federal funding which would address human needs, long-term infrastructure, or non-military actions in the world are scrutinized down to the dollar – at a time when the number of Americans in need is growing with every lost job or home foreclosure.
Reducing government spending by shrinking investments in our long-term well-being rather than cutting the military budget is as sensible as dieting by cutting back on salad while eating three desserts a day.
Even cutting nearly a trillion dollars out of the defense budget over the next ten years—a sliver off that third dessert— would leave us spending 14 percent more than we did during the Cold War era, according to analysis by the Sustainable Defense Task Force.
Yet the measure the House will consider this week for FY 2011 funding would cut just 2.8 percent from the president's FY 2011 defense budget request, compared with 20.6 percent from the budget for non-military foreign operations. Under this proposal the “Defense” budget will still increase by $8.1 billion dollars from the previous year.
We invest tax dollars in a shared safety net so it will be there to catch us during hard times. In our current slow-grinding economic crisis, more Americans have fallen into poverty, needing help with things like food and housing. The fact that the burden has increased on such programs as low-income housing and preventive health care clearly shows they are needed more than ever, not that they should be taken away.
Jack Lew, the Director for the White House Office of Management and Budget, writes that, “the sacrifices needed to begin putting our fiscal house in order must be broadly shared.” Yet all the cuts being proposed this week in Congress hit low- and middle-income families and communities the hardest.
Lew says the easy cuts are behind us. But simple math above says we have yet to seriously consider them. It’s time to pull back the cloak and make budget cuts where we need them most: in our off-the-charts military spending habit.
Robin Aura Kanegis serves as Director of Public Policy and Washington Office for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker-based organization working for peace, social justice and nonviolent change. She provides strategic direction for all aspects of the organization’s engagement with Congress and the Administration

March of the Dead on 9th Anniversary of War

A line of people dressed in black with uniform white masks walked slowly through the central bus plaza in downtown Providence this afternoon. 

The plaza was crowded with students and people going home from work, enjoying the gorgeous weather at the start of a three day weekend.  The war in Afghanistan was far from their minds.  I watched their faces as this strange parade approached.  Most looked puzzled or startled, then quickly became quiet and subdued. Many stopped talking.  Some pulled out cameras and took pictures.  Signs worn by the marchers carried the names of dead Afghan civilians - fathers, young men, women, children with names and ages, and date of death, followed by U.S soldier deaths and information on the other costs of war - the Post Traumatic Stress so many soldiers suffer and the $1 trillion that could have been funding head start programs, affordable housing, and health care.  Those of us handing out fliers found people to be unusually receptive to receiving them.  Some people wanted to talk.  "Had it really been nine years?"  "I had not idea so many people were dying there."  "Wow, it keeps going on and we hardly think about it." 

From the bus plaza we walked through city streets and over to the plaza in front of the Textron World Headquarters building.  We paused there, standing in silence.  One person came up to me looking curious.  I handed him a flier and explained briefly what we were doing.  A smile of recognition spread across is face.  "That's the perfect place to stand" - and asked permission to take a photograph.  The security guard came out, looking worried.  I handed him a leaflet, reminded him we were on a public sidewalk and assured him we wouldn't be there long.  (Note to self - we need to go back during work hours and stay longer!)

From there we walked back to the bus plaza for one more loop there.  Two teenagers came over curious about the masks but utterly baffled about what we were doing.  They had no idea that their country is at war.  Lots of work to do! 

As we debriefed at the end, the marchers we pleased with the event.  They found that being in the mask was very powerful, that it removed the personal dynamics that are part of most interactions and let the message just speak for itself.  Others spoke of it becoming a mediation walk, which allowed them to just be present to the horrors of war without the usual intellectual or political "noise".  And all commented on how well it drew attention and seemed to touch people. 

Thank you to all who participated.  I am grateful. 



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One Nation Working Together for Peace and Justice

On Saturday October 2 several bus loads of folks from Rhode Island attended the rally in Washington DC.  What began as primarily a labor rally focused on a call for good jobs morphed into a more complex message as well over a hundred other groups endorsed the rally and added their messaging.

Over 150,000 people attended, packing the space on either side of the long reflecting pool all the way to the end opposite the Lincoln Memorial.  It is pretty annoying to have the Washington Post under-represent the turn out, saying it "petered out" as you moved away from the Lincoln Memorial.   I guess they must not have actually walked through the crowd or seen the view from the far end (shown above).

There were LOTS of different and creative signs.  I was impressed at how common the theme of "end the wars/fund jobs" was.  I think it resonated with a lot of people - not all of whom came planning to carry a sign but chose to pick that one up. 

 I wasn't able to hear most of the speeches - I was helping staff the AFSC table at the far end of the Reflecting Pool.  I have a sense that a lot of the "dots" were there but that they weren't necessarily connected - war/military spending, militarization, immigration, funding for services, anger at corporate greed and congressional failure to bail out workers.  So that is our work as we come home - to build on the relationships and connections that came from bringing so many people together and connecting to dots so that we can tackle corporate power, massive wealth concentrated among just a few, the profiteering of the military industrial complex, immigration and more. 

We would love to hear what you thought of the rally.  Respond if you'd like and start the conversation of next steps.