Care for the most vulnerable & building community capacity

Community safety to me looks like community care for our most vulnerable residents.

It looks like safe, stable housing for the homeless. It looks like removing police from schools and from community events. It looks like supports for crisis intervention, mental health, addictions. It looks like harm reduction and decriminalizing survival, e.g. sex work, loitering, panhandling, etc. It looks like defunding the police and redistributing that money to community-led initiatives. It looks like demilitarizing and disarming police. It looks like support for survivors of domestic abuse. It does not look like more police or more funding or more police presence in communities.

Cops don't keep us safe. They don't prevent crime and they don't protect us - they can't. They escalate situations, cause further harm to communities & people, and perpetuate the conditions that led to harm in the first place. It's not a question of reform and it's not a question of a few bad cops - it's built into the system itself.

I once witnessed an assault at a crowded bus stop - a person repeatedly slapping another in the face with their full force, over and over again as the person being attacked did their best to block and dodge. No one stepped in to intervene despite there being at least 25 people present. Calling the cops would have greatly escalated the situation, and would have resulted in much greater violence. They were both Black and I am white so it would have put them both in incredible danger for me to call in the cops, so I did not. But the answer isn't to just let harm happen - the answer is to build community capacity to respond. We keep each other safe.