NO JUSTICE
“The same systems responsible for our oppression cannot be the same systems responsible for our justice.” - Derecka Purnell
Written by: Rev. Michelle Higgins
This week we observed the birthday of Tamir Rice, he would have been 18 years old this month. We observed the birthday of VonDerritt Myers. He was murdered in south St. Louis, in October of 2014, by an off duty police officer who later confessed to stalking him into a corner store. Faith for Justice was founded in December that year, by people who worked together to support the Myers family, after meeting regularly during the Ferguson Uprisings, sparked by the murder of Mike Brown, Jr.
When VonDerritt was killed, we marched with his family. In rage and grief we chanted “Indict! Convict! Send those killer cops to jail! The whole damn system is guilty as hell!”
And that is what I wanted. I wanted to see the police punished. I wanted the police to be policed. I believed that racist murderers deserve to be imprisoned for the rest of their lives. But over the past few years I have wrestled with the function of punishment as the power source behind systems of protection. That is, the age old assumption that keeping some people safe requires punishing the people we are afraid of.
Culture is shaped around this idea. Children are disciplined by it. Police and prisons exist because of it. Just this weekend, the Mayor of St. Louis city fed into it with bold-faced announcement of private information in a public space.
When Mayor Lyda Krewson shared the names and addresses of the people who wrote letters to her asking for more community control in the city budget, she gave unnecessary details and deliberately put people at risk. She proved the impossibility of trusting a guilt ridden system. Beyond demanding confession from killer cops, we must have accountability for the people who power their budgets, supply their weapons, and secure their pensions.
It is not just a few people in the system… it is the entire system. If there is anything to be rid of, it is the system that breeds racial terror. “The whole damn system is guilty as hell.” So I refuse to trust that system for accountability of any kind. If we are going to demand justice for the fallen and recompense for their loved ones, if we desire more faithful defense of Black life, we have to move away from any trust in the systems whose primary functions are false protections and fraudulent community care.
We cannot say defund the police and then rejoice in the arrest of police. Arresting is policing, it’s an action against the work of moving money to the places where resources are needed most.
Arrest, arraignment, prosecution, conviction and imprisonment all require resources. Namely, the financial resources that abolition would rightly drain from the system that is guilty as hell.
Demanding arrest and conviction for killer cops would require funding for the very actions we are targeting when we say DEFUND the police and INVEST in Black people.
This does not mean that abolition theory sees nothing to be done in matters of correction. It means that our communities must think more seriously, state more plainly, exactly what we want to see beyond the brokenness of prisons and police. I know that I want all cages abolished. The cage that is a police cruiser, the cage that is a bail hearing, a jail cell, the condo of cages that make up a prison. The system of cages that is the prison industrial complex.
Our imaginations are beckoning us. Abolition is an invitation to the work of determining that our communities do not depend on prisons and police to prevent harm, to reduce violence, or to rehabilitate people who abuse themselves and others. It is a commitment to doing the work of imagining more for ourselves, by establishing health and wholeness as the root and end goal of every system of authority.
Faith for Justice also affirms this commitment as people of God. We believe that wholeness is the foundation and future of justice. Derecka Purnell wrote recently, “I know that we want justice for Breonna Taylor. But there is no justice for the slaughtered. There is punishment, atonement, or accountability. Maybe other things, but not justice. The same systems responsible for our oppression cannot be the same systems responsible for our justice.”
This hard truth of human limitation was a hard pill to swallow. The more I chanted “Indict, convict… send them to jail!” the less I believed that any of these actions was useful, the more i doubted their power to bring peace was possible.
Wholeness is what we want; public justice for the people who must not become the next hashtag. Accountability is not punishment. Punishment is not protection. Punishment does not bring peace.
As we approach the so-called celebration of national freedom for some, I am moved to take a posture of holding myself accountable, and asking the people I trust to do the same.
I am committed to calling for loss of employment, draining city budgets and police pensions. I am committed to working to change laws and empower communities with financial investment, educational justice, economic mobility, and control of how social services are directed.
And I am determined to pursue the eradication of anti-Blackness in culture through the damnation of capitalism as the idol of our age. Dr. King said we have all of the resources we need right now. We can eradicate racism, poverty and militarism right now. All we lack is the will to do it.
We keep us safe. We got us. All power to the people who can co-equip and and self-determine to show each other, and the whole world, what freedom looks like.
Recommended resource:
Read Mary Hooks breakdown of how we achieve real public safety. Follow Faith for Justice for upcoming theological commitments and challenges for embracing an abolitionist ethic in every area of life.
https://www.essence.com/feature/defund-police-abolition-m4bl-song/