Chopping Down Apple Trees: Chauvin Verdict, Black Joy and Dismantling law and order

Every part of me wanted to find the joy in today’s verdict. I really wanted to conjure full on joy. I pray George Floyd’s family found relief and peace. But a 15-year old Black girl named Makiah Bryant was killed by police in Columbus, Ohio. I couldn’t shake that. A little 12-year old Latino boy named Adam Toledo was killed by Chicago police after complying. Anthony Thompson, a 17 year old Black boy was killed by Knoxville, TN police in the bathroom of his school. There is no joy to be had here.

I know for certain that any verdict has little impact. I’ve witnessed a criminal legal system take so much from Black people; a system that uses visible justice to blind our humanity. I’ve been harassed by police. I’ve seen them diminish Black, Latinx people (men, women, trans, queer) with no conscience. They look like they liked it. I was in the reform space once. In a room full of cops and community organizers, trying to understand the trauma on both sides, and walk people through reimagining a world without police. I could pinpoint which ones were fulfilling mandatory hours. You could see their white nationalist tattoos peeking through casual white shirts they wore on training and meeting days. The sleeves rolled precisely to show a little, but tell a whole lot about where they aligned.

There were the “good chiefs.” those Black and Brown men and women who were trying to quietly turn over tables from within. There were the community folks who hung on the promise of the “first ever Black chief.” I sat at a roundtable with a Latino chief of one of the largest cities in the U.S., and told him to his face that there “are no bad apples. The whole damn tree is rotten, chop it down.” He was incensed. His face turned red as he stood up and told me I was “out of line. Police are needed.” I stood up, smiled at him, and told him “we will end you.” That was 2015.

So there’s the lack of humanizing Black folks. Then there’s the property.

Military tanks roll through cities across America, occupying whole communities with a mission to protect America’s prized possession: property. The first American police force was formed in Boston in 1838 as the result of Boston commercial businesses needing greater protection of their property. As a large commercial center, businesses were eating the cost of protecting their property. Those costs were transferred to the public. During and post slavery, the replication of police departments in cities continued a practice of transferring the costs of taxes, citations and bogus debt to newly freed Black and Indigenous people, while creating the prison industrial complex.

The indelible need to protect property and maintain the order and perceived power of whiteness is at the center of policing. The need to wield power killed George Floyd. Any thing, person or entity that prevents the institution of capitalism, and questions the power, protection and fragility of white people must be annihilated. Policing maintains that perceived order.

Since the beginning of this democracy, the federal government has sought to quell the power of Black and Indigenous people to affect change. The first ever Congress passed a bill in 1789 to protect Frontiersman (white men) from Indigenous raids and uprising, and subsequently suppressed slave revolts in the South, targeting the many revolts happening in South Carolina, home to one of the largest ports of Africans trafficked into enslavement. Last week the state of Florida passed a bill to criminalize protestors and anyone who dismantled confederate statues. Same system, same playbook.

Erasure, violence and exploitation is the toolbox of white fear. Policing is employed to exploit Black and Brown people by pulling us over and criminalizing parking violations; to pay taxes that supply the salary of an entity that has the power to kill us without accountability. Every time we pay a parking ticket, excessive fines for petty infractions, city and county taxes on a bag of apples or chips, we pay police to kill us. Where they do that at? Oh, in places like Ferguson. And every other city and town in this country. The white population is becoming the minority. What do we do to maintain our hold? We kill you with impunity.

Not without a fight you won’t.

One night in 2018 I caught an Uber from Charlotte airport to home. I was returning from a trip working with community members to move money from police to grassroots victim service and violence intervention groups. My driver was a Black woman from a small rural city in North Carolina whose son, who battled with mental health issues, was shot down by police. She had begged them to help de-escalate and get a mental health professional. She had just returned from years of living in central America. The burden of the U.S. and her son’s murder was too much for her hear to bear. She said she drove the Uber because it allowed her to escape; to talk with people and live in their realities for a few moments. We exchanged numbers, hugged and she thanked me for the work I was doing to help move money away from police departments. Her experience is too common.

One of the first police murders that broke me was the Black man in New Milford (in Connecticut, my home state) who was shot in the back by police, on his knees. Malik Jones who was gunned down by East Haven, CT police officers who shouldn’t have been chasing him across city lines into New Haven, where he lived. He was my older sister’s schoolmate.

Then there was Amadou Diallo- 41 times for having a wallet in his hand. Then there was Sean Bell on the night before his wedding. Then there were so many more whose names I can’t remember right now. Then there was the time I strapped my 3 month daughter to my chest, the four year to my hip and organized around the killing of Trayvon Martin. Then there was Keith Lamont Scott in Charlotte where I reside. Then there was the series of Charlotte police murders of a deaf man, a man who couldn’t speak English, a man told to comply and then was shot in that Burger King parking lot. All in the city I call home now. And then there was…there are…so…many…more…I cannot keep up the count. Three people were murdered this past weekend by police.

No matter the verdict, justice looks like nothing less than abolition. Justice looks like George Floyd being alive. It looks like disarming an organized, state-sanctioned gang called the police. It looks like no police patrolling school hallways waiting to drag our beautiful youth into a pipeline of prison, deportation and punishment. It looks like my daughter not being threatened with police presence when she goes against authority defends another child from being bullied. Convictions are insufficient. The trauma, the lack of care and accountability for loss of life requires an overhaul of how we view safety. Police don’t even try to keep people safe. Only community-driven solutions that have been practiced in neighborhoods for decades, can ensure safety. Funding what works and defunding violence saves lives and transforms our imaginations. It can be done.

There is a radical loss of patience. And we will not back down. We’ve been out here. We’ll stay out here, protecting the community. Chopping down apple trees.