DEFUND THE POLICE

Poster we designed and riso printed for yesterday's protests. Attached is a full size digital version if you wanna print your own for future action ;)?

About the movement to defund police:
What does defunding the police even mean? The tldr is that it means substantially reallocating funds that are currently designated for the PD (we're talking 80-90%) and giving them instead to existing - and potentially novel - social services. Most of the work cops do (even here in big ol' scary Chicago) isn't engaging with violent crime, and is instead work that could be better performed by social workers + unarmed officials of different stripes. This includes engaging with the homeless, the mentally ill, civil disputes, simple theft, noise complaints, etc. Police are ultimately state violence distributors, and really that is what they're trained for. They will never be social workers, no matter how hard we try to make them be, so we need to stop introducing police into situations that they're not really equipped for and usually just make worse. Leave violent crime to a much diminished police force, and leave everything else to people trained to truly help our communities.

Please do not advocate police reform (or at least not *just* police reform) unless you want this pain to continue indefinitely. We've been instituting various versions of police reform since Rodney King nearly 30 years ago and even in supposedly progressive cities it's woefully ineffective, as the litany of evidence since then has shown.

Sign the #DefundThePolice petition at https://blacklivesmatter.com/defundthepolice/.