This week's entire show is selections from last weekend's conference in St. Louis MO on Community Control of Police.
The crisis means it's time to imagine self determination for our communities. What cops do in our communities will not change unless our communities are in the position to give the police their orders, according to Omali Yeshetila of the African Peoples Socialist Party. It's time to lift our sights beyond this black face and that reform and wrap the black political imagination and political practice around the project of actually controlling what the police do.
Hiring more black cops and “sensitivity training” won't prevent more Fergusons. As long as the core mission of the police include counter-insurgency and being the intake valves for black mass incareration, hiring more black police doesn'will nott change what police do, explains Glen Ford. Neither will so-called “community policing” or sensitivity training for cops. The policing mission will only change when there is authentic community control of the institution of the police.
Nothing in political is ever guaranteed, says Larry Hamm of the Peoples Organization for Progress in Newark NJ.
The only solution to a system out of control is mass organization to confront the powers that be. If power will concede nothing without demands, it's up to the organized people to make real and significant demands to change the way society is ordered, and to put their energies, if need be, their bodies on the line behind those demands.
listen
http://blackagendaradio.podbean.com/mf/web/5krg2z/BAR_042715.mp3
At the 1972 event, Walter Rodney proclaimed that “black unity must be international because we live on every continent, through no choice of our own.”
2020’s hindsight—frost in the rearview mirror. Miles Ahead… I’m Sheltered in Solidarity with National Poetry Month and Jazz Appreciation Month— April in Boston—warm cider
The critics want to wipe clear the actual history of racial oppression that is baked into the social and economic structures of the US.
The police as they exist today need to be abolished, there’s no question. “Diversity doesn’t change the fundamental dynamics of policing.”
Much of what is called the “left” still insists that the American “revolution” of 1776 is “unfinished,” when history shows that white supremacy was the intended result.
