A Rare Conviction Followed by More Police Murder. We Can’t Wait Any Longer to Defund the Police.

By Karissa Lewis, Kandace Montgomery and Miski Noor

Last week, a Minneapolis jury declared Derek Chauvin guilty on all three counts for murdering George Floyd. That night, thousands of Black people celebrated in the streets, taking a moment to breathe and feel relief. But the system reminded us almost immediately that these moments can only ever be brief: 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant was murdered by police in Columbus, Ohio in the minutes before the judge read out the Chauvin verdict.

No one verdict or trial in this unjust criminal legal system will deliver justice — that’s why the Movement for Black Lives is keeping up our call to divest from policing and invest in our communities.

George Floyd should be here. Ma’Khia Bryant should be here. Tony McDade should be here. The list of our dead is far too long, and growing every day. We mourn with their families and loved ones.

Meanwhile, the police continue to terrorize our communities, using tear gas and militarized weapons on protestors to try and silence our voices. In the past month, state and local officials in Minnesota spent millions of dollars of public money for ‘security’ expenses related to the Chauvin trial, essentially boosting policing in response to a mass mobilization of people who are protesting policing.

Without deep systemic change, this cycle of wasted public resources, murder, and violence will only repeat over and again. We’ve seen years of attempted police reforms fail to keep us safe, from Department of Justice investigations like the one just announced in Minneapolis to local police accountability commissions in cities like Philadelphia, New York, and St. Louis.

The solution is clear and has not changed: defund the police and invest in our communities.

Our communities need and demand more than a guilty verdict delivered through an unjust and racist system. We require real accountability for police and real safety for our communities. We are mobilizing to defund and abolish the police, because this is the only way we will stop police terror and bring about true public safety.

Last summer, George Floyd’s murder ignited a powerful movement that created a lasting impact across the globe. Since the uprising in defense of Black lives began, we’ve seen growing defund and abolition efforts from Minneapolis to New York to London to Los Angeles.

According to the DefundPolice.org website that M4BL launched with numerous partners, in the past year, organizers across the U.S. won over $840 million in divestment from local police departments, while securing at least $160 million in investments for communities.

But these wins have not been easy to sustain. In Minneapolis, even after the City Council unanimously voted in June 2020 to disband the local police department, an unelected body of Minneapolis bureaucrats and their pro-police allies stopped the community’s efforts to get the defund amendment on the ballot in the fall.

We must keep organizing toward our bold, Black, liberatory vision. At Black Visions, we’re leading a Yes 4 Minneapolis people’s petition campaign that will put our proposal to replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a Department of Public Safety directly on the ballot for voters to decide.

The road to defund and abolition will be met with detractors not only from law enforcement, but from some in our communities who struggle to imagine a world without policing.

We drafted the BREATHE Act, historic civil rights legislation, to showcase what a new model of public safety looks like — reimagining what can be done when we stop wasting billions of dollars on failed law enforcement approaches and begin investing in our people.

The BREATHE Act will replace policing resources with community safety measures including non-911 crisis response, violence interruption, transformative justice, and other non-carceral safety interventions. Further, the BREATHE Act will actually mobilize much-needed resources for education, health, treatment, climate crisis, jobs, and housing.

We know true public safety is about meeting our people’s fundamental needs, not policing or criminalizing them.

We will keep working in the Black community and with the families of George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and so many others killed by police. We will organize our neighbors and loved ones to build Black power and call on our elected officials to make real investments in our people.

There is no ‘reforming’ this system — the time is now to divest from deadly policing and invest in a vision of public safety that protects us all.

Karissa Lewis is National Field Director at the Movement For Black Lives, a national network of organizations and individuals creating a broad political home for Black people to learn, organize and take action. Miski Noor and Kandace Montgomery are two of the co-founders of Black Visions, which has been putting into practice the lessons learned from organizations before them in order to shape a political home for Black people across Minnesota. Black Visions is a central member of M4BL.