 Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Welcome to this spring semester Jefferson lecture. My name is Chris Tomlens. I am a professor of law here at Berkeley and the current chair of the Jefferson Memorial Lectures Committee. And it will be my very great pleasure in just a moment to introduce our lecturer this afternoon. Before I begin this introduction, I have to ask you please turn off your phones. Make sure that they are silenced because we are recording the lecture. And much more pleasant. After our proceedings are concluded, we are holding a reception immediately and we very much hope everyone will stay for that event, to enjoy yourselves. So, now to the important part. I'm delighted to have this opportunity to welcome Robin Kelly to Berkeley as this semester's Jefferson Lecture. I welcome him on behalf of the Lectures Committee, on behalf of the Berkeley Graduate Council and Graduate Division. The Memorial, the Jefferson Memorial Lecture series was established in 1944 through a bequest from Elizabeth Bernstiel and her husband, Cutler Bernstiel. They were a prominent San Francisco couple. They cared deeply for history and they hoped that the lectures would encourage students, faculty, scholars, members of the extended Berkeley community to study the legacy of Thomas Jefferson and in particular to explore the values inherent in American democracy. We fulfill their hopes in a critical spirit as befits a great university. As the lecture series has matured, the range of topics has matured with it. Our lecturers have spoken on the subject of Thomas Jefferson himself on early American history but they've also ranged far and wide on American institutions and policy, on politics, on economics, on education, on history and on law. Our lecturers have come from all points of the compass. Many have come from the academy, many from beyond it, from the worlds of politics and law, from media, from active civic engagement. The role of past lectures stretches back for a considerable period of time including such names as Ambassador Jean Patrick, Senator Alan Simpson, Representative Thomas Foley, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Richard Hofstadter, Carol Paetman, Walter LaFaiba, Paul Butler and Ed Gordon Reed, Judy Heumann, Ezra Klein and most recently Daniel Ziblatt. Robin Kelly, our lecturer this afternoon comes from our sister campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. He is distinguished professor and the Gary B. Nash endowed a chair in US history. He is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation. He is the recipient of the Freedom Scholar Award. His books, which have won many prizes and have extraordinarily beautiful titles, I might add. Thelonious Monk, The Life and Times of an American Original. Freedom Dreams, The Black Radical Imagination, Race, Rebels, Culture, Politics and the Black Working Class. Yomama's dysfunctional, Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America and Africa Speaks, America Answers, Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times and speaking personally just for a moment I have a particular fondness myself for his very first book, Hammer and Ho, Alabama Communists During the Great Depression. His essays have appeared in dozens of publications, including The Nation, New York Times, American Historical Review, American Quarterly, African Studies Review, Social Text, Metropolis, Journal of American History, New Labor Forum, The Boston Review, where he is a contributing editor and more. Professor Kelly is currently competing two books, both forthcoming from metropolitan books. The first is entitled The Education of Ms. Grace Halsel, an intimate history of the American Century. The second, which I believe has helped to inspire today's lecture, is Making or Killing, Cups, Capitalism and the War on Black Life. As you can see, Professor Kelly's lecture this afternoon is entitled American Sanitocracy versus Abolition Democracy on Cups, Capitalism and the War on Black Life. Please join me in welcoming Robin Kelly to Berkeley. I gotta turn this off. How's this? Okay, he's gonna turn it on. Every minute counts. Okay, how's that? Is that better? Okay, great, great, okay. So, yeah, see, I don't get that kind of applause unless my friends are in the audience. Ha ha, which is why this is so exciting because all these people that I haven't seen in a long time, as well as new friends, old friends, all here, so I'm very excited and I just hope you're not disappointed. And before I do all my sort of introductions, I should say that, well, no, let me do my introductions first. First of all, I have to thank Dr. Christopher Tomlins, who, amazing scholar, author, for inviting me to do this. I never thought anyone would ever ask me to give the Thomas Jefferson lecture. As bad as I talk about Thomas Jefferson, I mean, I'm always talking about notes on Virginia as an example of something that's not banned. But that's just me. And I think, I know Dylan and I are gonna have a conversation tomorrow, so I wanna thank him and hopefully he's feeling better. Especially thank Jane Fink for just dealing with me, because I'm a very difficult person. I'm slow on dealing with emails and everything and so it all worked out and I'm here in no panic. And especially, I wanna thank the Jefferson Memorial lecture folks, Chris as well, for basically keeping me out of debtor's prison. So, because I'm getting paid for this, which means I have to do a really good job. Usually I do stuff for free. Okay, and one other thing I should say before I begin, this is the first time, I think, in months, at least three or four months, that I'm not talking about Palestine. I'm happy to talk about Palestine at any point, but this is actually significant because in fact, I was just in New York the day before yesterday, I was just there yesterday actually, talking about Palestine and labor. And it's on my mind and I stopped everything. So, including this book, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna talk about this book I'm trying to finish and decided to talk about the whole thing. Just give me a sense of what I'm trying to do and read from basically kind of the introduction or the parts of it. But just keep in mind that because I've been focused on Palestine and I haven't really been dealing with this, it's almost new to me, you know? And I'm an old person. So, if you ask for some details about stuff and I have to look it up, don't be mad. I'm just saying that's how it goes. Okay, so let me just begin. So on June 22nd, 2020, some 200 mourners filed into Atlanta's historic Ebenezer Baptist Church to pay their last respects to 27-year-old Ray Shard Brooks, shot to death 10 days earlier by Atlanta police officers. Reverend Raphael Warnock, Ebenezer's pastor and soon to be US Senator delivered the eulogy. He opened with a cautionary note about the dangers of COVID-19, the need to social distance, but then he pivoted and he said, there's another virus in the land and it's killing people. There's COVID-19 and there's what I call COVID-16-19 and they are both deadly. We've been trying to beat back this virus of racism since 16-19. Mass incarceration is its latest mutation, but it is an old virus that kills people. You don't have to be shot down by a police officer for racism to kill you. You don't have to have access to healthcare that will kill you also, if you don't have access to healthcare. If you've got crumbling schools, there are more ways than one to kill somebody. So Ray Shard Brooks spent his life navigating this system barely dodging death's bullet. By the spring of 2020, everyone close to him believed the young father of three would prevail. Just 10 days before being laid to rest, Brooks had spent a lovely day celebrating his daughter's blessings, eighth birthday. That night, he pulled into a drive-through line at Wendy's restaurant in Southwest Atlanta, slightly inebriated, Brooks began nodding off at the wheel and eventually fell asleep. When honking vehicles couldn't rouse him, a Wendy's employee called 911. Officer Devin Bronson arrived on the scene and determined that he might be intoxicated. But rather than allow him to sleep it off or walk to his sister's house a few blocks away, he called for backup. Officer Garrett Rolf arrived and proceeded to perform a pat-down and a field sobriety test. Brooks spoke passionately about needing to make his daughter's skating party the next day. He asked more than once if he could simply leave the car and walk to his sister's house and they refused. The breathalyzer registered a blood alcohol content slightly above the legal limit. The moment Officer Rolf tried to cuff him is when Brooks decided to fight back. He pulled his wrists and set off running. The two officers got a hold of him, but he struggled to restrain him. Brooks then grabbed Bronson's taser and punched Rolf in an effort to get away but not before Rolf tased him. Brooks managed to flee while firing the stolen taser but missing badly. A second later, Rolf fired two bullets into Brooks's back, one piercing his heart. And as he lay there bleeding out, Rolf proceeded to kick Brooks and Bronson stood on his shoulders. They waited over two minutes before rendering medical aid. Now the officer's actions surprised no one who had ever witnessed encounters between police and black people. We've come to expect this kind of behavior from a system of policing rooted in anti-blackness and a warrior mentality. What struck me was Brooks's actions. His desperate attempt to escape told his life story without words and laid bare in strobe-like fashion the history of black fugitivity in the modern world. I saw a fugitive trying to escape the clutches of a slave patroller. I saw a posse preparing to string him up to a tree in Douse's body with kerosene. I saw a black man who had known the inside of a prison cell terrified by the prospect of returning to a cage, losing contact with his children and further jeopardizing his chances to make a living. Now Brooks had been on probation for five years and had another six to go. He'd been dealing with the criminal justice system since he was 10 years old. He spoke about these challenges to a nonprofit group called ReConnect four months before he was killed. In the eight minute video interview, Brooks indicts the system for treating the incarcerated quote as if we are animals. He says, by you having this so-called record, it's hindering us from going out in public to try and provide for us so far as getting a job and getting ourselves back on track. It's hurting our kids and it's taking away from our families. Besides the barriers to employment, Brooks had to navigate strict curfews, mandatory classes, pay a litany of fines, perform community service, meet regularly with his probation officer and try his best not to violate the law. So a DUI on probation would have sent him back to prison. He'd been arrested in Ohio several months earlier because he moved there without telling his probation officer. His father, whom he had met for the first time in 2018, lived in Toledo and Rayshard was relocating there with his family. He'd gotten a job but by violating the terms of his probation, he was forced to return back to Georgia which is a poignant conclusion given the historical and symbolic importance of Ohio as a safe harbor for fugitives from slavery and it goes back to Georgia. Rayshard Brooks was not about to return to quote being locked in a room for 23 hours a day. I'm not the type of person to give up, he said at the close of the interview. I'm gonna keep going until I make it to where I want to be. The autopsy report determined the cause of death to be homicide. However, one deadly encounter with police in a Wendy's parking lot does not explain why he couldn't make it. Why he was especially vulnerable to state sanctioned violence. To put it bluntly, Brooks and many thousands before him who died at the hands of the state were casualties of COVID-1619 or more accurately, COVID-1492. There were the latest casualties in a 500 year old war that birthed the modern world. A war built on the theft of humans of land and water, indiscriminate murder, violation of customary rights, dispossession, planetary destruction and outright lawlessness in the name of law and order. Sometimes the war was declared, the war on drugs, the war on crime, the war on terror, the war on subversives, the war on migrants, the war on savages. Mostly it went undeclared. The police are trained for combat and tend to see black people in low income communities as potential enemy combatants. Now the persistent killing of black people at the hands of the state cannot be reduced to a failure of law or government to reign in rogue operations. The police are just the tip of the iceberg. Cops and vigilantes may serve as the final executioners, but in war determining the cause of death is a complicated matter. To fully understand who or what killed Rayshard Brooks and countless others requires a different kind of autopsy, a historical postmortem that can lay bare the structural conditions responsible for premature death. In other words, we need to examine the blood at the root as it were. The racial, class, and gender terror at the base of our system of exploitation and wealth accumulation. The blood at the root is gendered racial capitalism, which is simply a way of saying that capitalism and the exploitation inequality in class divisions it creates is inseparable from the racist, cisgender, heteropatriarchal social order in which it emerged, flourished, and reproduces. So making a killing, actually I'll keep this up there, employs a method of historical autopsy to reveal the hidden relationship between policing and capitalism. So taking as my starting point Ruth Wilson Gilmore's off quoted definition of racism as the state sanction and or extralegal production and exploitation of group differentiated, group differentiated vulnerability to premature death. Actually let me jump that one. Yeah, that's the slide I wanted. So you can actually see the chapters of this book. So what I do is I reconstruct the lives and life worlds of selected victims of state violence in order to uncover the policies and processes that rendered them vulnerable to premature death in the first place. Each chapter opens with a single causality or single casualty about it. An account of their death, a genealogy of their life, and a history of the world that strangled them in their communities. Before the gunshots, choke hold, blunt force trauma, needle, and the like, there was the slow violence of unemployment, suppressed home values, predatory lending, underfunded schools, food deserts, public hospital closures, a shrinking welfare state, an expanding carceral state, and the hazards of living in proximity to toxic waste dumps, freeways, bus barns, and oil and gas production facilities. So these policy outcomes are the source of chaos and disorder, and the role of the police is ostensibly to restore and maintain order, right? That's ostensibly. So making a killing demonstrates how police in tandem with other state and corporate entities are engines of capital accumulation. Government revenue, gentrification, the municipal bond market, the tech and private security industry, in a phrase, the profits of death. Now I'm not the first to argue that the police function to protect property over people. This argument really is as old as police itself. Making a killing is an attempt to deepen our understanding of the political economy of policing that accounts for its racial and gendered character, and for the myriad ways in which black resistance and survival strategies shape police policies and practices. Okay, so the book structure, and the questions that inform it, or a great debt to historian Peter Lionbaugh, who's a great friend, his magnificent book, The London Hang, Crime and Civil Society in the 18th Century, which I suggest, it doesn't matter if it's not in your field, you should read it. It's a beautiful book. It examines capital punishment as a mode of class and gender discipline, thereby exposing the foundational role of law in the early formation of modern capitalism. He called 18th century England a Thanatocracy, a government that ruled by the frequent exercise of the death penalty. The exercise of Thanatocryk, Thanatocryk, I'm so tired, I have a step in two days, so let me just slow down. The exercise of Thanatocratic power was not limited to legal execution alone, but as he puts it, extended in manifold ways to war and genocide. Lionbaugh conducted his own historical postmortem on the men and women sentenced to death and hanged at the triple tree in Tiber and England. Calling his methodology, Tibernography, he reconstructed the lives, life worlds and livelihoods of the executed, where and for whom they worked, the wages they earned, the rights they won and lost in the crime, the criminal crime that brought them to the gallows. Now, most committed crimes against capital. You know, you could kill someone and get sent to a new world, but if you steal something, you will be hanged, right? And that means either taking property to which they were once entitled, and we could talk about that, taking control of the labor time, outright robbing the moneyed classes, highway robbery, and taking the lives of fellow proletarians present and future. As London's working class contested the boundaries of private property and immiseration under the nascent industrial system, the state created a new disciplining body, and that is the police. Policing entailed a wide range of activities, spying, arresting smugglers, beggars, idlers, gamers, recruiting and disciplining labor, patrolling ships, streets, waterways and colonies, suppressing riots, even surveilling and subjugating London's growing black population. Above all, the police protected property and commerce, and yet line about cautions against treating workers as a noble enemy of capital by making clear-cut distinctions between say social banditry on one hand and predatory crimes on the other. It is the immiseration of the working class that gives rise to various forms of property crimes among and between the poor. Now, just as so-called black and black crime cannot easily be delineated from the policies that produce poverty for charity and carcerality and illicit economies regulated through violence, the distinctions between crimes of resistance and the violence and theft that occurs frequently within subjugated and oppressed groups are always blurred. So whereas the London hang committed crimes against property, the people I write about were killed for insubordination, failure to show deference to armed agents of the state, standing in a way of property classes or property interests, or simply being black and poor. But the absence of crimes against property does not mean property did not matter. Criminalization begins with the original crime, the original crime of capturing and turning Africans into property, rendering their efforts to seize freedom of crime against property. That is to say a violation of the rights of their punitive owners. In the post reconstruction era, as Khalil Muhammad demonstrates, modern science grounded in social Darwinist principles further legitimized the association between criminality and blackness. Criminality became a racial trait, an incontrovertible fact shaping police policy and practice over black communities. Now, let's see if I got it. Actually, I'll leave that up there. That's gonna come soon. So making a killing, look specifically at policing in the neoliberal city. And granted, some of the chapters go back to the 19th century, but my main obsession is from the 1970s on, when the federal cutbacks and the global slump of the 1970s left a lot of municipalities financially strapped. Urban police department simultaneously became financial burdens, as well as new vehicles to generate revenue. The war on drugs became the military arm of the neoliberal turn, managing social crises, or as Loïc Wacant puts it, social insecurity. And it created the erosion of the social safety net in absorbing more public funds to fuel police and prison expansion. This led to more aggressive policing, new technologies expanding surveillance in military capabilities, ballooning budgets, as well as an increase in misconduct and wrongful death claims. So with cops protected by qualified immunity, the exponential rise in settlements pushed revenue starved municipal governments deeper into debt. Police violence became a major source of internal tension as small groups of organized black cops and civilians attempted to change policing and fight racism within the force. The defeat of these efforts set the stage for the current state of war. Now, it also set the stage for the current abolitionist movement, expressed most widely in the Black Spring protest of 2020. Now, calls to abolish the police and prisons and to shift resources to housing, universal healthcare, living wage jobs, universal basic income, green energy in a system of transformative justice are not new. But these kinds of proposals never gained this level of popular support were taken seriously before the spring of 2020. And I would say 2014, but 2020 was really a turning point in many ways. Demands that were once considered pipeline suddenly seemed viable and even necessary. Now the shift didn't happen overnight. And just to be clear, I'm not saying that the shift is permanent, lost that. That window has closed in many ways. And so I don't want you to misunderstand what I'm saying here, but it was a window. And but my main point is that it was a window that was open a long time before that. And that is that nearly three decades of organizing, scholarship, political education and coalition building, explain why so many people can even mouth the words to fund the police or abolish the prison. Let alone understand and embrace the idea. So we wouldn't be here without Angela Davis's books, Our Prison's Obsolete and Abolition Democracy or if Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow had not become a runway bestseller. We wouldn't be here if a new generation of activists hadn't devoured, discussed and debated the abolitionist anti-capitalist writings of Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mumia Abu-Jamal, Ma'am Kaba, Gina Dent, Joy James, Dylan Rodriguez, Beth Richie, Andrea Richie, Alec, Lexis Pauline Gums, Julia O'Para, Erica Miners, Dean Spade, I mean I could go on and on and on. There's many, many names. And of course we wouldn't be here without a vast, if we hadn't had a vast network of radical black and multiracial movements, a new abolitionist movement, waging war on American Thanatocracy. And they include groups which I write about in the book, like Dream Defenders, Black Youth Project 100, Movement for Black Lives, Million Hoodies Movement for Justice, Society of Daughters, Letters Breeds Collective, Hands Up United, Millennial Activists United and so on. And many others that I discuss in the book. Now what many, but not all, of these organizations share in common is an assumption that the abolition of the carceral state, which includes the police, is inseparable from the abolition of capitalism. Now I struggled with how to proceed to kind of give this talk today because I was trying to figure out what I should just give a case study from the book or talk about the entire book. And I decided on the latter to kind of talk very broadly about what I'm trying to do with this book. But I will underscore some key points of interventions I'm trying to make in each chapter. So the book begins with a prologue about the life of George Neely, which I won't talk about, we could talk about in Q and A, but I've interviewed family members of his and done some really deep researches. It's not a long prologue, but there's a lot of things about his life that in some ways mirror the entire book, every aspect of it from police violence, gender violence to substance abuse, which I talk about as well. So after that, after the introduction, chapter one briefly sketches the evolution of police from colonial militias and slave patrols to professional departments responsible for protecting property and maintaining class, racial, gender, and sexual order. Though I said much of this, much is focused on policing under neoliberal capitalism. Now, besides looking at the obvious things, we know the obvious things, so-called broken windows policing, the 1994 prime bill. The chapter in the entire book actually examines things like the uses of fees and fines and civil asset forfeiture as sources of municipal revenue, much of it extracted from poor black people, poor black and brown people. Some states permit law enforcement agencies to keep seized assets, even if there's no conviction or indictment. And in cases where agencies are required to return property, the process is a bureaucratic nightmare. I don't know if anyone's had this stuff forfeited before and tried to get it back. Even if you've done nothing, it's very, very difficult. As Jackson Smith shows in his forthcoming book, forfeiture functions as an informal tax on capital flows in the underground economy, money that is generally shrouded from the IRS. And it all adds up. So between 2002 and 2018, the Department of Justice and the Treasury in 42 states seized over $63 billion in cash and property, $42 billion under federal laws, $21 billion under state laws, and 70% of all forfeited property was cash. That's a lot of money. And I also look at things like, how the police are organized, which begs the question, are cops workers? McColl's Segal perceptively calls them violence workers, arguing that they fall within a category of laborers tasked with executing authorities coercive functions, the military, private security, corrections, and so on. And therefore, the police quote are, this is her words, are the human scale expression of the state. So there were attempts to unionize, famously the Boston Police Strike of 1919, but efforts of sort of traditional labor unions such as the AF of LCIO, which did have unions in the 1930s and 40s, failed, in part because for the state, the police functioned as a domestic military and therefore subject to military discipline. A 1946 opinion piece, and believe me, but the editorial board of the LA Times summed it up, and it said that this is why the LAPD can never be unionized. And they wrote, the police force is in effect a military force, which must obey the lawful orders of superiors without hesitation or reservation, and must not have any divided allegiance. And by divided allegiance, you know, they're talking about no allegiance to striking workers, for example, right? Who they're dispatched to manage your question. Officers were encouraged to join the fraternal order of police, which was not a union. It lobbied for increases in police budgets, promotes, promoted and promotes departmental loyalty and morale, reinforces racist and anti-working class law enforcement practices. And by the late 1960s and 70s, the situation began to shift in ways I think are really interesting. First thing that happened was black police officers around the country began to organize their own protective leagues in response to urban insurrections, racist police violence, workplace discrimination and corruption. So black police groups, such as the Guardians in New York, and Connecticut and Pittsburgh, officers for justice in San Francisco, the Black Police Officers Association in Oakland, and the Afro-American Patrolman's League in Chicago, and Atlanta understood protective to refer to black communities rather than their own jobs. And I'm not saying everyone in these organizations, but those that took leadership. And I want to really emphasize the timing of it. This is like 1968. So if there's an opportunity for a shift in consciousness among black officers, that's it. This is not making a case for why we need to hire black officers because I got my ass kicked by a black officer. So I'm saying, this is not what I'm trying to say, but this is something about that moment that's important. In any case, Cincinnati Sentinel Police Association, for example, was founded in 1968 specifically to combat racism and brutality and to improve community police relations. The best known example, of course, is in the most radical was the Afro-American Patrolman's League founded in Chicago in 1968 to address the excessive discipline meted out to black officers over time. And it ultimately developed a vision of policing as an anti-racist model of public safety aimed at eliminating police violence and finding effective strategies of stopping street violence and crime. The APL president, Renault Robinson, wrote a weekly column for the Chicago Defender called Black Watch. And he quoted Fanon and Malcolm X. And he supported the Black Panther Party and called for the redistribution of the nation's wealth, those are his words. He compared Chicago Police Department's presence in black communities to that of overseers and colonizers. He did not subscribe to the bad Apple theory or consider police violence to be an aberration. And you could read, I write quite a bit about it in the book. The Chicago Police Department and Mayor Daly invested almost as much energy waging war on the league as they did on the Black Panther Party. Members faced repression and reprisals. Renault Robinson was arrested several times. They were suspended, their pay was docked, their threats of termination and vicious misinformation campaigns. The APL filed suits against the Chicago Police Department and persuaded the federal government to investigate the department's record of discrimination and policemen's conduct. The other factors that had an impact on that period was the global slump of the 1970s, the decline in municipal revenue and the concentration of urban poverty. So violence work actually increased in this period. You might call it a speedup. Crime rates did rise, but the cause of the speedup was not the crime rates, but the ideological and legislative push to lock up more people. The violence work of mass incarceration is not simply a matter of the introduction of more draconian legislation or sentencing mandates, but requires the extractive work of producing prisoners. The strike wave of the 1970s, the escalation of protests, the general distrust of cops, urban decline caused by capital flight, white flight, a growing illicit drug trade, reductions in city services, not to mention municipal budget cuts, which began the process of turning police into generators of revenue, all contributed to a general speedup and growing malaise surrounding a police work. So when we think about the strike wave of the 1970s, that include cops who were going on strike as well for different reasons. So in Cincinnati, like elsewhere, the fraternal order of police blamed liberal judges, criminal justice system and civilian review, and of course, black leaders for allowing criminals to run amok. In March of 1979, 600 wives of police officers calling themselves, quote, United for Police and Community Service, marched on city hall to demand more powerful weapons and protective equipment and to condemn any criticisms of police officers. Sounds familiar. Two months later, police officers staged a one-day strike which succeeded in winning their demands. So what are their demands? High-powered 357 magnum weapons, expansion bullets and bulletproof vests. You would think a raise might be in there, or like benefits or more time off for the children for daycare, you know, none of that stuff. The police unions exploited white fear, community fears of crime, blackness and cops fear of replacement. Police unions devoted more time to fighting civilian review, supporting conservative mayors, monitoring and opposing liberal judges, lobbying for increases in state-of-the-art weaponry and backing statewide campaigns to restore the death penalty. So today, the role of police unions is to protect cops from liability in doing violence work on behalf of capitalism. Qualified immunity, illegal defense created by the Supreme Court shields law enforcement officers and government officials from being held personally accountable or financially liable for violating people's constitutional rights. In other words, they are not responsible for settlements or judgments against them for misconduct. Union contracts include provisions that would disqualify misconduct, I'm sorry, disqualify misconduct complaints and then also grant officers a waiting period before being interrogated after an incident, place limits on officer interrogations or provide information ahead of time that would allow cops to align their stories with available evidence. And we've seen this, we've seen this over and over again. It also allows them to remove past misconduct investigations from an officer's file. So that's not a new struggle, that's actually was written in a lot of these contracts and requires cities to cover legal fees and paid leave while under investigation. Cities have also been saddled with skyrocketing costs of settling policemen's conduct cases. Qualified immunity protects officers from any financial liability and so because the total cost of settlements and judgments usually exceed city budgets, cities cover the shortfall by what? Issuing municipal bonds. The dub police brutality bonds, these neoliberal financial instruments shift the cost of police misconduct to the public. The bonds used to cover misconduct settlements and judgments of general obligation bonds which means the money is earmarked for projects that do not generate any revenue at all. Leaving taxpayers responsible for paying the debt whose terms prioritize who? The bondholders over and above the city's budgetary needs. And this is where Wall Street comes in. Yeah, I'm not gonna mention all those numbers but it's worth to check them out. So banks underwrite and manage the bonds and deal directly with the bondholders. Financial institutions in order to have that role, they collect fees for the services which along with interest increases the real cost of settlements. So there are no limits on how much banks and financial institutions can profit from these bonds. So for example, in Los Angeles between 2008, 2017, police brutality bonds amounted to about 71.4 million dollars plus an additional 18 million dollars to cover interest paid on the bonds and the fees for managing the bonds. So in other words, taxpayers end up paying 89.4 million dollars for a police misconduct. And schools could use that money, I just thought. By far the worst example of how finance capital profits from police violence can be found in Chicago. And by the way, my Chicago chapter is 100 pages. It's like a book and so my editor's killing me about this but Chicago is so special because it's not only like the capital of every single terrible thing that the police do, but it's the capital of the most vibrant abolitionist movement certainly in North America. I mean, and there's so much, so many movements and I've got them all in there. In any case, Chicago leads all of the cities in payouts from misconduct and wrongful death cases. And part of it has to do with the torture cases which we could talk about, but between 2010 and 2017, the city paid out a total of 709 million dollars. But given the interest rate over the life of the loan, the city is estimated to owe about $1 billion to bondholders plus another 7.1 million in underwriting fees to Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo and the Bank of Montreal and Mesero Financial Incorporated. Now the failure to change police practice and use of force policy cannot be attributed simply to opportunism or finance capital or blamed entirely on the power of police unions. Private corporations in particular have demonstrated their commitment to a robust militarized police force by investing in police capital, improvement bonds, public debt securities, issued to finance equipment purchases and capital improvements to police properties. So corporations, as well as some universities, I won't name them, but there's a lot that have actually donated generously to private police foundations. So the National Police Foundation, originally called the Police Development Fund, was established in 1970, created by the Ford Foundation, which backed it with about $30 million in private grants. The foundation was establishing response to the mass rebellions in America's urban centers during the late 60s. Over time, they became conduits for corporate finance, to finance police, to influence policy and to introduce hardware and technologies in which they actually have a vested interest. So Amazon, Bank of America, Starbucks, Google, Microsoft, and Target, or Target, as we say, are just a few of the police foundation's biggest corporate donors. Police foundations enable departments to purchase equipment like surveillance technology, guns, ballistic helmets, drones, et cetera, and directly assist officers with bonuses or legal fees with no oversight or public input. And by the way, when those cops went on a kind of blue strike, as it were, after Bronson and Rolf actually were about to be indicted, they were fired, actually, on their job after killing Ray Sharp books, they went on a strike and they were paid by police foundations so that it was like the strike fund. And I think that's important to remember. In any case, they continue to function as private research and development armed for law enforcement, especially in the area of technologies and surveillance, data mining and management, in the growing field of predictive policing. And so for donors, the purpose of R&D is investment. They are not performing a public service. And I talk a lot about that in the book. So chapter two traces the origins and consequences of the neoliberal turn through the tragic death in life of Walter Vandermeer, who's a Harlem kid who died of a heroin overdose in 1969, just days after his 12th birthday. Now, he suddenly became the poster boy for the new war on drugs, prompting a flurry of articles, legislation, drug education programs, and theater pieces. I was actually growing up in Harlem, you were only a couple of years older than me, and the night he died was the night, I'll never forget this, because it was a big deal in New York at the time. And that's why, part of what I'm writing about him, and it's about policing as I'm gonna show in a second, but he died on the night that Jackson Five premiered on the Ed Sullivan show. And everybody was watching it. If you didn't have a TV, you went to someone's house. That was like a big deal. And then the next day, that was the news. In any case, turning Walter Vandermeer into a symbol obscured the actual cause of death, which is embedded in his family story, intergenerational poverty, racism, urban divestment, immigration policies, his father was from Suriname, policing, poor schools, and a woefully inadequate social services bureaucracy. So while Vandermeer was not killed directly by police, his death was weaponized to criminalize drug addiction, attack social welfare, expand urban policing, prioritize punishment over therapy, although it's tricky because both were happening simultaneously, and advance big farmers' methadone market. Simultaneously, the state waged a covert campaign against radical groups, such as the Black Panthers and the Young Lords, which had begun developing natural, community-centered, effective ways to resist the drug economy and attack addiction, which put them in an opposition to the methadone industry. And methadone, they're paying all the city council and all the state representatives. Anyway, these are folks who claim dope is death, and pushers are the enemy of the people, while identifying the real killers as racism, poverty, the police, and above all, capitalism. They considered the flood of heroin, a manifestation of U.S. imperial and chemical warfare, which they tried to counter through political education and community-based detox programs. And of course, we recently lost Matulu Shakur, who was really the lead person doing acupuncture and acupressure to detox. Now, the state not only crushed the very organizations addressing addiction by non-chemical, non-carceral means, but deployed the police department deeply involved in the drug trade. So by 1969, the Narcotics Division of the NYPD was arguably the second largest heroin dealer in the city outside of the Lucchese family, crime family. And I'm not making that up. Look it up. Read my book when it comes out. The state not only crushed what might have become a new abolitionist culture of care, but the institutions charged with protecting children like Walter never broke its ties to the racist police state. In other words, Walter was caught in a carceral web before he even took his last shot. Part of the story is how he ends up being moved from boys home to juvenile detention centers to what he and his brother actually, and his brother Tony Vandermeer is a professor now at UMass Boston, you should look him up because they're fighting a battle to save black studies against my former dean of the School of Education who is just reaping havoc. I mean, just look it up. But the point is that Walter was like nine years old, 10 years old in a carceral system. They wouldn't even put him in the same place. I mean, Tony is like writing these letters saying, please can put my brother so we can be in the same place. They wouldn't do it. And then the school, and this is a thing that's shocking, the school expelled him, not suspended him, expelled him at age 10. What do you do? So when he died, he had just turned 12. He had just turned 12. Anyway, the same can be said about Timothy Thomas, which is chapter three, the subject of the Cincinnati rebellion. But in some ways, his last shots were delivered from a police-issued Smith and Westman revolver. As the 15th black man killed in Cincinnati by the police over six years, Thomas's death in April 2001 incited the first major urban uprising of the new century. He was pursued for unpaid tickets, which is why the title of the chapter is The Price of the Ticket, which turned into outstanding warrants, but he was a casualty of administrative violence and ongoing settler war for land, which now has a polite moniker of gentrification. So entrepreneurs, speculators, developers, preservationists, and cultural elites have been trying to take back the land once occupied by German emigres, since at least the 1970s, this is over the Rhine. They wanted the land, but they didn't want the people, most of whom were black and housing insecure. They ramped up their efforts in the 1990s with help from the city and its chorus of arms. So between 1995 and 2001, police made an average of 2,300 drug arrests per year in over the Rhine, a neighborhood whose total population barely exceeded 7,600 in 2000. Meanwhile, the city, the chamber of commerce, the urban land institute, private home ownership shifted public funds from social services to underwriting private development and placed a moratorium on new low income housing, built up the arch district, established more businesses, restaurants, art galleries, and a jazz club. And the new settlers got the land, but the people were still there. Fear of the black poor spawned a cottage industry for cops looking for extra work because they didn't get that pay raise, they got guns, but they were still struggling financially. And so it was a security guard working at one of the restaurants that spotted Timothy Thomas because everyone knew him. It wasn't like he committed a crime, he was walking on the street and they knew he had warrants. He chased after him, called the cops, and then they killed him in the alley because of tickets, right? So Thomas's story and those of other victims of police violence and the history of over the Rhine neighborhood where Thomas died provide a window into a century of state sanctioned war. Land grabs, corporate tax breaks, capital flight, organized abandonment, black resistance and police reaction. I tell the story of over the Rhine from the 19th century all the way up. It's a very interesting place. Cincinnati became the model for both 21st century urban policing and 21st century anti-police rebellion. A lot of the facts as you see in 2014, turning the flag upside down, burning down the police, they did all that stuff in 2001, all of it. And a terrifying case study of course of the long history of gender racial capitalism. Now three weeks after the vigilante, George Zimmerman killed teenager, Shevon Martin, a white off-duty police officer named Dante Servin, fatally shot 22 year old Vickiah Boyd. And Boyd's story, which is by Chicago story, the subject of chapter four, was overshadowed by Martins largely because of gender and partly because the press in Chicago treats black homicides as routine. That's where you get the Charac, you know, Charac. Right wing apologists for police shootings always point to Chicago as proof that black people kill each other more frequently than they are killed by cops. Perhaps, but the Chicago police department was arguably the city's biggest armed gang. And in many ways, Boyd's death resembled a gangland shooting. And it's not a story of bad apples. For over half a century, torture, harassment, even assassination were standard procedures in the windy city, sanctioned and authorized by all other branches of government. We know this because of Chicago's radical history of resistance to police repression, stretching back from the murder of Fred Hampton and Mark Clark to the torture victims under police commander John Burge. But lurking beneath the story of anti-police protests is a lesser known tale of how the CPD's gangster proclivities cost the city billions of dollars, as I mentioned before. And it's no question that Vakia Boyd's family received a settlement of $4.5 million. How that actually played out, I talk about in the book, because no one ever gets $4.5 million. When you take away from taxes to other kinds of fees, it's really just almost a fraction of what you get. Because given all these payouts, you would think that the black community is full of rich people. And you say, where's the money go? So I traced the money. And we're talking about a family struggling to this day. In any case, although more than two years past before a kind of robust movement emerged demanding justice for Vakia Boyd, when it did, the forces represented arguably, as I suggested earlier, the most radical and broad-based abolitionist movement in the US. Centering around organizations like Women's All Point Bulletin, the Chicago Task Force and Violence Against Girls and Young Women, BYP 100, Fury, the Chicago Alliance Against Racism and Political Depression, Recharge Genocide, Project NIA, BLM Chicago, Let Us Breathe Collective, and so on and so forth, Assata's Daughters, an entire generation of young activists and artists, almost all of them, let's be honest, trained by Miriam Kaba. I mean, you ask any of them. They all were around her. And she doesn't try to take credit for that. But she was such a presence there in Chicago. And I don't want to center on any individual because she would hope me accountable for that. She wouldn't slap me, because she's an abolitionist. But she'd hope me accountable. But I really want to give props to Miriam Kaba because there's really no one like her in terms of the role she played for young people. I'm talking about young people, young poets and artists, young activists who are trying to find their way. Anyway, the movement converged with a longer struggle to secure justice for victims of police torture and later for Laquan McDonald. And their efforts actually brought down a prosecutor, brought down a mayor, brought down top police brass, secured reparations from the city. And I would argue, in large part, is responsible for the election of Brandon Johnson. And they still fight. Now, change is hard. That's a beautiful picture. As evidenced by the story of Michael Brown Jr. Tell Angela I said hi. Yes, I wish I could go. I'm subtle. Yeah, I wish I could go. Anyway, change is hard. Evidence by Michael Brown Jr. and the Ferguson uprising. And for one thing, life was exceedingly hard for Mike Brown, his siblings, his parents, his grandparents. I mean, theirs was a world of unremitting precarity and economic insecurity. And for Brown's mother, domestic violence. Black St. Louis and his satellite municipalities were subjected to entrenched segregation, concentrated poverty, unemployment, dilapidated housing, underfunded schools, a system of policing designed to control, terrorize, and exploit working class black communities. An objective observer might look at the last century and a half of St. Louis history and call this protracted war. And I discussed war. I discussed Dred Scott, East St. Louis Bergram, the black female led labor and tenant organizing, the formation of action, the black liberators, organization for black struggle, and other organizations all the way up to 2014. The young people who occupied West Florissant Avenue in the wake of the killing and public display of Mike Brown's body did not come out of nowhere, but were part of a longer anti-war movement. And part of what frustrates me is this idea that they had no background. They just kind of came out of nowhere. There was no organizing, but there's an organizing tradition that goes back. They stood up not only for Brown, but to protest, and this is important, a predatory system of policing that use citations, fees, fines, and arrest warrants to extract millions of dollars for mostly poor black communities. So don't let anyone tell you that Ferguson wasn't about anti-capitalism. You gotta pay attention to what they're actually doing. Ferguson became the nation's epicenter of a modern day abolitionist movement and a model for how to turn protests into political power. Yet, even as progressive black leadership class, veterans of the 2014 uprising, when seats is alderman, city counselors, state legislators, city and county prosecutors, even mayor of St. Louis, casualties of police violence continue to mount to this day. Police budgets swelled, police unions became more strident, and the much-tired reforms were ineffectual. So whereas Michael Brown had kind of global recognition, few outside of Mississippi had actually heard of Jonathan Sanders, who's the subject of Chapter 6. So on the night of July 8th, 2015, a white police officer in Stonewall, Mississippi, pulled the 39-year-old Sanders from a slow-moving horse and buggy and choked him to death. Despite eyewitnesses, the coroner determined the cause of death to be cocaine toxicity. In other words, they saw mechanical affixiation, but they did not, but they claimed there was cocaine in the system, and of course they couldn't find it. Had it not been for his mother, Francis Sanders, who waged a virtual one-woman protest in front of the Stonewall Police Department, the killing of Jonathan Sanders may never have seen a light of day. This is a story of deindustrialization as well, and state plunder by way of the war on drugs. Francis, who's pictured there, had worked for the Burlington Mill in Quitbin, which is just about five minutes away from Stonewall, for most of her adult life. It was a major source of employment for the county, and when it shut down in 2002, she lost her job, like everyone lost their jobs. The following year, Jonathan had been arrested for possession and sale of cocaine, entirely on hearsay testimony from a dealer who was avoiding a long sentence. So Jonathan served three years in Parchman State Penitentiary, and had to pay fines exceeding $5,000. After his release, he lived with his mother, trained horses, started harness racing, but was constantly harassed by the cops. In 2015, the year he was killed, the Clark County Narcotics Task Force seized his truck using civil asset forfeiture and $2,500 in cash after allegedly finding drugs on the ground outside of his vehicle. Four months later, he was dead. Now, Francis retained two radical Jackson-based attorneys, C.J. Lawrence III and future mayor, Chokwe, and on to our Lumumba. The Lumumba family and their comrades were part of a move by the provisional government of the Republic of New Africa to go to Mississippi, eventually take over the state and build a black nation. And it came close, because instead they built a strong political economic presence in Jackson for which the state has waged and continues to wage a punitive campaign that is ongoing. And this is part of the story of that chapter. Tragically, Lawrence and Lumumba were pushed off the case by the mother of Jonathan's children who managed to secure a settlement for herself and her children, but no one, no one has been held accountable for the killing. And Francis Sanders to this day is still fighting. Chapter seven looks at the surveillance, criminalization and disposability of black women. Policing has done nothing to ensure black women's safety or reduce the alarming incidents of femicide that plague black communities. Instead, black women, especially poor women, continue to be monitored, harassed, subject to reproductive control on the pretext that they possess illicit disease bodies. And the presumptive criminality means that they can be killed or disappeared with no corresponding investigation or concern. The chapter opens with the murder of a black trans woman, Dominique Fells, who was killed at the height of the Black Spring rebellions in Philadelphia. And then looks back at four specific waves of black femicide, Stanford, Connecticut in the 70s and Washington DC in the 70s, Boston in the 80s and Los Angeles between the early 80s and 2016. So groups like the DC Rape Crisis Center and the Black Coalition fighting back serial murders mobilized against the routine killing of black women who were almost always poor, victims of sexual violence and regarded as disposable. Now the chapter deals with state complicity, particularly policing in the disappearance of black women. In fact, given the militarized landscape of South Los Angeles during the 1980s, it is easy to classify these women as casualties of war. And let me explain. The war on drugs and gangs heightened police harassment of sex workers in South Los Angeles, especially as the crack cocaine economy reshaped the sex economy. Many, if not most of the victims were trading sex for crack or working the streets to earn money to secure drugs. Unlike addicts who trade sex for drugs without leaving the crack house, street prostitutes paradoxically enjoyed more personal dignity while being more vulnerable to violence produced by the gendered hierarchies of criminalized sex industry. Black feminists leading these movements to combat gendered violence and the murder and the disappearance of black women develop a radical analysis linking femicide to economic precarity and the state. So for example, Margaret Prescott, who's pictured there, founder of the Black Coalition Fighting Back Serial Murders. She was also co-founder of International Black Women for Wages for Housework and had a long history of organizing sex workers and welfare mothers. So Prescott grasped the racialized and gendered economic basis for poor women's vulnerability and defended all reproductive labor as valuable work, deserving dignity, protection, and fair compensation. Long before she formed the Black Coalition, she was fighting against the very conditions that rendered all poor and working class black women subject to premature death. The Black Coalition's slogan was count all women's lives. Has been Prescott's mantra throughout her entire political life. Although the campaigns I write about were not calling for the abolition of prisons or police, they nevertheless promoted an expansive political vision that was fundamentally anti-capitalist and understood black femicide as systemic and indirectly facilitated if not sanctioned by the state. In some respects, their work helped later foundations for abolition feminism. Finally, as I will argue in chapter eight, which is not even written yet and may actually be dropped from the book. I'll see how it works. I'm looking at Breonna Taylor as a casualty of war, the casualty of war on drugs and a system of policing designed to protect property and crush descent. So she was born in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and her mother, Tamika Palmer, was part of the reverse migration of moving south of African-Americans thinking the south was safer. And the same thing with Angela Leisure, who was Timothy Thomas's mother. She moved from Chicago to Cincinnati and in Cincinnati I think of it as the south. When you go there, you'll see it as the south. Grand Rapids was undergoing severe unemployment, rising crime, and Breonna's father, Everett Taylor, was caught up in the system, caught in the web of the 1994 crime bill and served time in some 16 different prisons, in some cases for things for which he would have gotten probation or lighter sentence before the crime bill. In 2016, he participated in a hunger strike in prison rebellion at Kinross Correctional Facility. And as it turns out, Breonna Taylor walked the straight and narrow and still wasn't saved. She was one in the long line of victims of the Louisville Metro Police Department. Two decades earlier, Louisville cops killed several unarmed black men over a four year period. Long time residents will say their name still, Adrian Reynolds, Desmond Rudolph, Antoine Bryant, James Taylor, and others. Groups such as Citizens Against Police Abuse, Kappa, and the Kentucky Alliance Against Racists and Political Repression took to the streets to demand greater accountability and they never left the streets. The officers who killed Taylor worked for the Place-Based Investigations Unit, PBI. It was created in 2019. The unit concentrated on West Louisville neighborhood that had been targeted for redevelopment. It's very much like over the Rhine. The city and the LMPD tried to bury the incident, but Breonna's mother, her sister, Janaya, and the activist community of Louisville would not allow it. They took to the streets in the middle of a global pandemic and forced the city to fire three of the officers involved past Breonna's law banning no-knock warrants. How that's gonna last, we'll see, and it also paid their family $12 million and agreed to some reforms. Yet Louisville activists know that these measures were not in the nightmare of unchecked police violence. Anti-black racism and the kind of deep structural inequality that provishes neighborhoods and assigns police to manage the poor and protect property. Finally, the book ends with an appeal to stop all cop cities. Actually, I'm meant to put that up there for Breonna Taylor. As of right now, there are 69 new facilities being built to train militarized police. All plans since when? Spring, Black Spring 2020. They weren't planned after the attempt at the coup on January 6th. No, they were planned and that stuff, right? As soon as Black people came out. And so I think this is an important place to end because here, here, in this confrontation that we witness is abolition democracy and decolonization versus American Thanatocracy in action. Cop city is a story of militarized accumulation, meets struggle for the commons. 85 acres of the Wilani Forest, the sacred lands of the Muskogee Creek people from which they were forcibly removed by white settlers so it could become a plantation where enslaved Africans grew cotton for the world market then a penal colony and prison farm then back to become a commons. And so now it's gonna be a so-called training center for our domestic armies. To be funded by who? The Atlanta Police Foundation is gonna give $90 million. Taxpayers gonna pay 33 million plus 1.2 million per year over 30 years. And that's probably gonna go up. Much of it is overseen by a coalition of Black Atlanta Democrats and right-wing political leaders at the state level. And as we know, the state will kill and lock up people for decades to make sure it happens. They've already killed somebody. They're already about to lock up people using recall statutes. And here we are, do we really think Trump is the only fascist threat before us? And really, let's just think about what's going on right now. If that's not fascism, I don't know what it is. And I return to my brother, the Reverend Raphael Warnock. We recently got honorary degrees at Bard College. So he's like a friend. Whose warnings about COVID-19 ring hollow given his support for Cop City. Think about that. There is no cure for COVID-19 without sustained social movements, without sustained commitment to dismantling capitalism, without sustained commitment to ending war. And that requires remaking ourselves, building new communities based on recognizing the sovereignty of indigenous people, restoring a sense of the commons and rebuilding our cities. Not as sites of global finance and state violence, but as new communities governed by new values of cooperation and mutuality. And if we could win that, we can actually have a future. Thank you. So thanks for hanging in there. So any questions or, and by the way, we got started late, so don't be mad at me. I was, yes, the question comments. Yeah, it doesn't matter what it's about. I answer any question. Can't wait to read the book in this powerful presentation. I guess I wanna bring you back to sort of where we began. What do you make of the sort of backlash against the abolition movement, the defund movement, a certain at least consensus among the white media that it was a quote failure and a overreach on the part of activists. I sense that you see a much longer term struggle going on here that is not subject to the vagaries of a couple of polling cycles. Well, the last thing you said, I'll take that language. That's exactly right. You said it more eloquent than I could. So that's absolutely right. I think I'm not surprised by it because I can't think, I'm a historian. I can't think of any time whether we're talking about reconstruction that Du Bois talks about, whether we're talking about the aftermath of the urban rebellions in the mid-60s and early-70s. There's always that response, always that backlash, always the argument that's failure. I mean, think about the white supremacists and liberals too spent so much money on creating an image of the failure reconstruction. All those monuments, making movies, like Birth of a Nation and all that, they put so much money into proving what people know wasn't necessarily true. That wasn't a failure. It was defeated, but defeats different than failure. So they're trying to make the doing the same thing. They're saying, well, you know, that wasn't really a great idea in the first place. Now, what is true is that given the politics of the moment, given the momentum, a lot of politicians kind of jumped on the abolition bandwagon knowing that they weren't really committed to the idea what they were committed to was making sure that they can keep their constituency happy and making sure that another building is not burned down. And so that's part of it is a kind of fakery. There's also, which always happens with mass movements, I'm sorry, I shouldn't say. There are mass movements and then there's mass insurgencies that are not always connected to movements. And so a lot of people did leap on the idea of abolition without thinking through in the way that so many of the people I mentioned been thinking through this a long time. The idea, for example, that abolition is not an absence, not just an absence, but a presence. My daughter made correct me on that, but a presence. That divest, invest is the idea of redirecting resources to create actually safer environments. Even the mythology that somehow the absence of police will just lead to crime run amok. And the fact that it matters that if you look at the police budgets, police budgets have gone up since 2020, just across the board, across the board. And we're not any safer. So there's a lot of work to be done. And I think that the people who are really dedicated, committed abolitionists, and they don't all agree, to be expected, are not worried about that. They're not worried about the kind of backlash. They knew what was gonna happen. People got behind Joe Biden and said, we're gonna keep our mouth shut, we're gonna stop talking about abolition business, we're gonna support Biden, even though he said more money for the police, and that's what happened. You know? And look where we are now. I'm just saying, because I think about policing as not just the United States either, you know, but yours foreign policy. Anyway, I answered the question, but there's a lot there in the back, yes. I'll be faster. I just had a couple of questions about what you found mining the history, because I had made some earlier errors when I was doing this in the program in public health. And so I started down the road of, in the South, slave patrols in the Southern States, in the North, merchants wanted to protect their stuff and stop paying Pinkerton, and, you know, Bobby Sir Robert Peel and whatnot, without going further on that road, when Andrea Richie was like, hold up. So I just want to know what your thoughts were on her argument, that model of policing, a lot of surveillance and not as benign and avuncular as we try to make it out, and it actually wasn't as strong an influence as the fact that the enslaved people in Northern states often were housed outside of where they were in doing captive labor. And the other thing was if you found anything about Daryl Gates and the UFC United Farm Workers and the origin of SWAT teams, because that was something I had found as curious what you found in those. I'm not writing about LA, but I do know something about that in terms of the origins of SWAT. I mean, there are different interpretations of how SWAT came about. I wouldn't be surprised by the argument that United Farm Workers would be maybe targeted, but I think that SWAT, to me, isn't a break from previous LAPD operations. The only difference is that they created a separate unit and trained them slightly differently, but they're doing the same thing. I mean, you think about all the shootouts with the Black Panther Party, 41st Street, for example. You think about the shootouts that took place even in 1950s. These are just common practices. On the question of the origin of the police, I'm not trying to write about it, but I do take issue with, like I'll mention slave patrols, but slave patrols are not the origin of the police. But slave patrols are much closer to what Engels writes about when he talks about our bodies of our men. So to be in slave patrol is not a job. You're not working for the state. You are basically in a position where in some ways, sometimes you're recruited, but you're also expected to do that in part because you think you are like a volunteer saving civilization from the runaways. So if you can, ideologically, can convince a whole population that these people whose lives are precarious, almost as yours, the differences are there, they're enslaved, you have some mobility. That somehow you shouldn't be joining them in a revolt, but instead you should be policing them. That's an ideological move. Much of, see, I'm really interested in urban policing specifically. With the exception of Mississippi, it's not the countryside but it's a small town. A small town with ties to equipment and also ties to meridian. So in some ways, like the so-called drug trade in rural Mississippi is not much different from any place else. The war on drugs is not much different. The difference is that there is even fewer possibilities of oversight. And one thing I didn't mention was that from the research I did in Stonewall, there was a point where there were more drug arrests of black people in Stonewall than there were black people in Stonewall. I mean, everybody was being arrested, including the day that Jonathan Sanders was arrested 2003, his mother was also arrested and they couldn't charge her or anything. They were arresting everybody. But that's like backwater stuff but tied to the modern police state. So I'm not sure if that answers your question, but a lot more work has to be done on the origins of policing because modern police is not the same thing as other forms of policing, which is sometimes not paid by the state. Someone had to hand, oh, I'm sorry. I'm, you and I'm gonna get Savannah, yeah. He had his hand up. I'm gonna get Savannah next. Hi, thank you so much. My question, I was wondering if you could speak to the overlaps and continuities between cop cities and the technologies of, and what we're currently seeing in Palestine just in terms of like the technologies of occupation and control that we see, you know, the Israeli state deploying there. Right. There's obviously a lot of resonance there, but it feels especially acute with the trajectory that the United States is on with these cop cities, but also with increasing, I think, presence of fascist, you know, the rise of, or increasing rise of fascism in the United States. So. Well, increasing or latent. Yes, exactly. No, I mean, I don't even have to make a comparison because they're direct links because the training comes from Israel. Not just militarized police, but the junkets between US police captains and US police officers and Israel in terms of their own security state. They've been going back and forth since the 1960s, since post-67, really. And especially more recently. So what's happening right now, those 85 acres, I was just in Atlanta recently. Much of their training comes from Israelis, but in vice versa. And so when you think about crowd control, in particular, because those training facilities are not, they're very specific. They're about dealing with rebellions and dealing with labor uprisings, especially rebellions. And so that's what they're preparing for. Much like in Israel, they've been preparing for occupation. I mean, that's what they do. And there's occupation in West Bank and East Jerusalem, but there's also policing within 48 borders, which is to say, you've got Palestinians who could never leave because they were the ones that were not dispossessed immediately. And they live under a police state. In fact, it wasn't until 1966 that military administration was removed. They weren't a military administration inside Israel from 1948 to 1966. And it was removed, but it wasn't removed entirely. So they deal with that all the time. And so a lot of different organizations like Jewish Forest for Peace and others have been revealing these linkages and ADL has also been supporting these linkages until recently they were discovered and then they try to back up from it. So yes, and none of that, there's a financial connection as well because when you think about what kind of weapons they're using, they're not like handguns. They're military weapons. And some of that comes from the 1038 program that the federal government funds these plus much of the weapons that being sold, well, I sold to Israel, that's not exactly right. They get the money, they get scripts, they go back to the US weapons manufacturers and use that as vouchers to get the weapons that they want and then they resell them to all kinds of rogue states. All kinds of rogue anti-Semitic states as well, which is kind of funny and tragic. But yeah, so the connections are crystal clear. It's always there and I think it's worth continuing to like dig and dig and see how they're operating. Anyway, well, Savannah, and then we're gonna, okay, don't give me a hard question. Oh, my bad, my bad. Because you're smarter than me. First of all, thank you so much and I really wanted to thank you for lifting up Remy Fell's name, the sister who was killed in Philly because among other things, I'm from Philadelphia and I feel very connected to that neighborhood, but one thing that's really been so painful about her murder is the way that her murder has been spun in the media as part of a narrative of out-of-control crime in Philadelphia and how people who actually have no value for her life or her sister's lives now are so concerned and the person who literally killed her, his trial is being delayed right now and is top of the nightly news over and over again and it's part of a narrative of out-of-control police of crime in Philly and was also part of what was used as a narrative to impeach Larry Krasner, who was the progressive district attorney at the time. So I guess I wanted to hear you talk a little bit about, because we had a progressive district prosecutor impeached here, Chase the Boudin in Frisco and so can you talk a little bit about kind of this gambit of progressive prosecutors as a tactic and then the usage of this kind of strategic usage of black death as a motor for a different kind of political counter-rebellion against those kinds of strategies. Do you know what I mean? Right, no, no, I know exactly what you're saying. Well, you're going to see people know about Branny Fells, who's most what I write in the chapter is about her life, which is really extraordinary, model, had all this skill and also the precarity of her life, which is not any fault of her own, but it's like all the stuff that she had to do was just to survive and had all these aspirations. I mean, so to me, it's like I focus on her life and how it was cut short. And of course, you're absolutely right. The way her death and lots of deaths are used as examples of the failure of progressive prosecutors. And this is like, see this is why we need like lock them up type people. What's interesting is that this wave of progressive prosecutors was actually precedes spring 2020. And I would argue that, you could see it after 2014, where in fact, go back to Trayvon Martin, but from 2014, from 2012 on up, there was a real movement recognizing that we can't spend all of our time trying to elect a president and or even electing just city council, but the role of the prosecutor is extremely important. And we saw some hope in Chicago, didn't work out exactly that way. Chase Bruzin was amazing that he ran, given his background, I mean that he won. And Gascon in LA who, you know, it's not quite Chase Bruzin, but he's better than the people that they want and may be better than who, well, I won't say. But I think the right caught on to how important the prosecutor is. And so it's easy for them to attack them when they don't care about black life. They don't care about the deaths. What they care about is making sure that they have a law and order draconian prosecutor in that position and sometimes they're winning. And this is where the abolitionist argument really has to be extended, engaged and embraced because you cannot measure success or failure of a prosecutor whose job it is to literally either put people in jail or try to keep them out. And we got people trying to keep them out just for change. Knowing that keeping them in jail doesn't help matters. It makes things worse. But it requires a kind of long-term vision because easy to chalk up numbers, you know? So these are dangerous times. I think it's worth going back to that and making sure that we can support progressive prosecutors all together, you know? Because they're also dangerous since they deal with cold cases. And all these people who are in prison for stuff they didn't do, you know, Larry Krasner was doing some of that stuff. I mean, Mumia's case is a good example. So these are dangerous times, you know? But I don't know if they answered the question, but yeah, I hear you. In the back and then. Yeah. So I've been thinking through this one problem for a while. And I guess the question has a kind of two-link premise and then the question itself. But I think that too, and you've implied this in your presentation, but I think that to abolish the police presumes the abolition of private property because the police are the kind of right arm of the state or whatever in following up with force in contestations over property. Yeah, we've been talking about the police's role in kind of ensuring the embodied property of kind of, yeah, black and nominal logical subjects through history, but there's also a relation with the kind of regulation of non-embodied material property like factories, commercial parcels. So it seems that one of me to abolish private property in order to have an abolition of the police. So I think that's the first premise, but I think one of the limits of abolition or at least one that I've been kind of pondering through is the extent to which abolition finds its limits at the jurisprudential decrees of courts and constitutions. So if we view property as a kind of, or at least when I think through property or private property, I think of both with the wage labor system and also tenancy or the kind of residential property, which you address housing in your research through the signifier of gentrification, but I think the police and law enforcement serve a pretty strong role in regulating the relationship between landlords and tenants in the holy eviction process, but I think a limit with the abolition of private property is the constitution and in an era where the courts at all levels are being packed or have been packed with conservative judges, we seem to have a legal limit in jurisprudence, stare decisis precedent and the takings clause of the constitution, which sets a limit on what the abolition of private property could look like. So I think what do you think are ways through this challenge? And I think one thing I think through is like with the abolition of feudalism in 1789 in France, the August 4th decree which abolished feudal plots, it didn't mandate that the signorial lords would be compensated following the abolition. So how do we abolish the police, abolish property when within the constitution ingrained by the juridical system, there's a kind of limit on what our revolution can do on the ground with how it impacts outcomes? State right in the United States, and that was the debate they had, the Fifth Amendment debate about how do you abolish slavery, that was a debate. And how do you abolish slavery and not compensate the master class? And the fact is they did compensate the master in all the states where they were not rebellious. They used kind of emergency powers to get around the Fifth Amendment without ever saying that there should never be property in human beings. Number one, without ever saying that no human being should have their mobility limited to the point where they're put in a cage. That was considered legal. So what I'm saying is that I hear you, I agree with you. And of course there's a limit, of course you limit the constitution. The constitution wasn't made for abolition. They tried to be made, I mean, black people tried to remake it through fighting for what became the 13th, 14th, 15th amendments. And that was the closest it came to making some kind of revision where you had to go back and change some things. That's why all those right-wingers who were reading constitution, they don't want to read the original one. They want to leave all the other stuff out. But they can't do it because of the constitutional limit. I mean, that's impossible. Unless of course you basically rewrite it or give it up. And that's, so I agree with you. I said fundamentally this is question of private property. Now, let me just clarify something because I think sometimes you're obviously a brilliant law scholar. So I mean, you're smarter than me. But what I do know is that we sometimes think of private property as everything as opposed to real estate, for example, or landed property, or like you say, factories. So for example, I think about, if you've probably read this before, but Dave Graber and Dave Wengel's book, The Dawn of Everything. And they talk about the importance of property in terms of tools. Like if you have a tool, for example, or some things that are important to you, or even a dugout, right? If you buy a dugout, I mean a canoe, where the canoe could be actually someone's property but still be shared. In other words, it's not so much about whether or not it is owned. It's how is it acquitted? How is it used? So let's say we abolish private property and land. I mean, if you think about West Africa, for example, when you have situations where you don't have private property in land, but you actually had forms of property in women. Meaning that you have this whole system of bribe price where you basically are paying a family for the loss of the labor through marriage. And the more wives you have and the more children you have, the more land you can cultivate. So it's a way of getting away from question but also still using ideas, not so much of ownership, but of again, how do you use the land? Not property, but how do you use the land? How do you use the land in ways that might be consistent with the culture? I'm not saying that's a good idea. I'm saying part of abolition is thinking beyond all that. In other words, not being caught up in the limits, but also being realistic about what you can do under circumstances. Are there things that can be done under the current constitution better than what we have now? Yes. Can we actually have what people imagine to be a truly liberatory future with the constitution? No. That's not possible. And we also have this culture in which nobody wants to touch that constitution. Like, you know, no one wants to touch it because that's the thing that's holding together democracy and it's part of the mythology, you know? So I don't know if that answers the question. I know people are mad at me because people have to go, but I don't, right. We can do one more question. Yeah, I know you had your hand up for a while. Thank you so much. My name is William. I'm a geography PhD student here. As you were talking and you mentioned kind of the plethora of activists, academics and thinkers inspired kind of the abolitionist movement, abolitionist democracy as you put it. I was thinking about my own, like the own pedagogy I've experienced here at Cal coming to America to kind of study Black Studies. And what I've noticed since being here is when I'm taught Black Studies and when I'm taught kind of abolitionist scholarship, very often it's through very limited resources. And what do I mean by that? Very often it's taught by a few publishers. Near enough, most things I read in Black Studies recently are coming out of Duke University Press. My daughter has a book coming out of Duke University Press. Right, and so there's both a good and bad in that. We're both, both, both, both, they're presenting and projecting Black scholarship, but also there's a risk of monopolization. And so I'm wondering, in juxtaposition to the plethora of activists, thinkers and academics that you mentioned, how do we get to that and get away from simply one publisher, Black Studies, abolitionist scholarship? That's a really good question. Of course, you have colleagues here who can answer that. I could tell you what I do. In most of my classes, and I'm not in Black Studies right now for various reasons, but I still do it. I can't help myself. It's kind of like, you know, breathing. So I don't actually use a lot of texts. I use a lot of primary texts. I use old stuff. I also use blogs. If you were to just read prison culture, this is my improvist blog, just read it. Just from beginning to end. You got so much stuff and it's free. It's so much brilliant material. I mean, there's so many things that are in circulation. And yes, publishers have a bottom line. They're trying to make money. And Duke University doesn't make that much money. Trust me. I know the people there. And they really do publish quality stuff. And there's a reason why. I think a lot of really amazing scholars end up going there and going to other publishers. Haymarket is another one. Haymarket's different because Haymarket does things like, they give away books to prisons for free. They're not trying to make money. They try to, if you say to them, look, I'm broke, I need some books, they'll just send it to you. Because that's their operating system. They also publish books that no one else will publish. So my suggestion to you is all the people that I mentioned, every single one, you could read them without having to pay anything. Because they're all online. They all publish things or write things that are there in the atmosphere to sort of engage. And there's that, but there's also the tradition of going back to text that we tend to assume we know. Like right now I'm teaching a graduate, I'm sorry, undergraduate seminar on black reconstruction. You know, undergrad, I got 22 undergraduates. And we're reading it along with other texts that kind of engage the question. And basically they're not paying anything because they have a big PDF of it and then all the other articles are free. So I don't make people pay for stuff. I'll make them pay by your book. But I mean, I don't make people pay for stuff. And that's because some of the best stuff that T. Thomas Fortune, he wrote a book in 1884 called Black and White. I think that's the people, everyone should read that book. There's so much history and so much material, so much literature that precedes us. That of all the great things out there, including my daughter's book, I think she's a genius, I would go back to that stuff. That's black studies, you know, I would go back. I mean, there's no reason not to read Equino again. No reason not to read, you know, Mariah Stewart and her speeches. There's no reason not to read any of that. Go back and read it over and over again. And then, of course, get outside the United States and then suddenly you got a whole vast literature, Brazil, all over the Caribbean, all over the continent, Africa, and of course Europe, you know. I mean, London had like 10,000 black people in 1790. They were writing, you know, and they have stuff to say. So that's my suggestion. You can't get around the commercial nature of publishing industry. Well, we have to break it though, you know. And I think more and more of my colleagues are doing things like, you know, using commons to make sure that people have access to the text for free. Like, you know, no one's making that much money off of it anyway. So why make people pay $35 for a book? Makes no sense, you know. And if you have a PDF of it, look, I never made money off of Freedom Dreams because it's a PDF circulating all over the place. I know. And there's a new edition now, but no one's made the PDF yet, but someone's gonna do it soon enough. But am I losing people over that? No, not at all. But hope that helps, you know. But there's a lot that we need to learn. I know, I went way past my time. I'm sorry. Thank you.