Critical Resistance: Getting Real about Alternatives to Cops

*Note: There is no internet access on the conference site, so these live blogs will be posted with significant delay. Sorry everyone!
Getting Real about Alternatives to Cops
Critical Resistance 10 Conference, Rose City Copwatch
Founded in 2003 in Portland Oregon
Building community power in opposition to police violence
-observing police behavior (videotaping police)
-agitation, disruption
-reconciling police abolition with concerns about safety
Examples:
-bad date line for dangerous johns
-Community committees in apartheid SA where the police had abandoned the neighborhood
-Peace for the streets by kids from the streets, Seattle WA “donut dialogues”
Alternatives vs Auxiliaries? How do we reconcile programs to make policing better or safer with a larger goal of prison abolition?
-Hate crimes, violence against women and their usage to legitimize and escalate policing (the idea of “vulnerable populations” who need defense)
-Ubuntu, an organization run by survivors in Durham NC
-Trust building and community building as ways of creating our own networks for safety
-Emergency healthcare: police are always a part of first response
-Philly Stands Up: Sexual Assault Survivor Support
-Gang intervention in a community: mothers in the community would make lunch and go eat it on the corners where young men were hanging out. It was a way to reach out to them and make them uncomfortable.
-Grandmothers used as a security system, tough love policing
-What is crime? How do we look at that critically? Criminalization of drugs, stealing, what about morality, ethics, crime defined by harm?