Crew Dragon Demo-2

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_Dragon_Demo-2 

 

SpaceX Demo-2

Launch of Crew Dragon Demo-2
Names	Crew Demo-2 Dragon Crew Demo-2 DM-2
Mission type	ISS crew transport
Operator	SpaceX NASA (customer)
COSPAR ID	2020-033A
SATCAT no.	45623
Mission duration	Planned: 30 to 90 days Elapsed: 10d 23h 38m
Spacecraft properties
Spacecraft	Endeavour
Spacecraft type	Crew Dragon C206
Manufacturer	SpaceX
Crew
Launching	Douglas G. Hurley Robert L. Behnken
Start of mission
Launch date	30 May 2020, 19:22:45 UTC
Rocket	Falcon 9 Block 5 (B1058.1)
Launch site	Kennedy, LC-39A
Contractor	SpaceX
End of mission
Landing date	Planned: between 29 June and 28 August 2020
Landing site	Atlantic Ocean
Orbital parameters
Reference system	Geocentric orbit
Regime	Low Earth orbit
Inclination
Epoch	30 May 2020
Docking with ISS
Docking port	Harmony PMA-2
Docking date	31 May 2020, 14:16 UTC
Time docked	10d 4h 45m
Behnken (left) and Hurley (right) Commercial Crew Development ← SpaceX In-Flight Abort Test Boe-OFT 2 →   Crew Dragon flights ← SpaceX In-Flight Abort Test Crew-1 →

Crew Dragon Demo-2 (referred to by NASA as SpaceX Demo-2 and by SpaceX as Demo-2) is a crewed flight test of the Crew Dragon spacecraft, which launched on 30 May 2020 at 15:22:45 EDT (19:22:45 UTC). The first attempt to launch on 27 May 2020 was aborted at T−16:53 minutes due to bad weather caused by Tropical Storm Bertha. Demo-2 was the first crewed orbital spaceflight launched from the United States since the final Space Shuttle mission, STS-135, in 2011, and also the first crewed orbital flight ever operated by a commercial provider.

The mission launched spacecraft commander Douglas Hurley and joint-operations commander Robert Behnken to the International Space Station (ISS). The spacecraft soft-docked with the ISS on 31 May 2020 at 10:16 a.m. EDT (14:16 UTC), slightly earlier than the scheduled time of 10:29 a.m. EDT (14:29 UTC). NASA estimated roughly 10 million people watched the launch on various online platforms and approximately 150,000 people gathered on Florida's space coast in addition to an unknown number watching on television. The Crew Dragon capsule used in the launch was named Endeavour after the Space Shuttle Endeavour.

Background

After STS-135, the final mission of the Space Shuttle program in 2011, the United States' NASA no longer had any spacecraft system capable of sending humans to space. Subsequently, it used Russian facilities to send its astronauts into the International Space Station (ISS), costing up to $80 million per astronaut with the Soyuz. NASA started engaging with private companies like SpaceX as an alternative, which is expected to cost 50% less than Soyuz once the Commercial Crew Program is in regular operation. Up to the launch, NASA has awarded a total of $3.1 billion for the development of the Dragon. The Demo-2 mission is expected to be SpaceX's last major test before NASA certifies it for regular crewed spaceflights. Prior to that, SpaceX had sent twenty cargo missions to the ISS, but never a crewed one. Other than SpaceX, Boeing is also working on crewed orbital spaceflight under the same NASA effort.

Crew

Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken were announced as the primary crew on 3 August 2018. Both astronauts are veterans of the Space Shuttle program, and the Demo-2 flight was the third trip to space for both of them. The lead Flight Director for this mission is Zebulon Scoville. Additionally, the crew brought along a toy Apatosaurus dinosaur named "Tremor", a Ty flippables plush toy they had selected from their sons' toys. As in past space missions, the plush toy had been used as an indication of zero gravity for the strapped-in astronauts. Behnken and Hurley said, "That was a super cool thing for us to get a chance to do for both of our sons who I hope are super excited to see their toys floating around with us on board".

NASA calculated the loss-of-crew (LOC) probability for the test flight as 1-in-276, lower than the commercial crew program requirement threshold of 1-in-270. The 1-in-276 number includes mitigations to reduce the risk, such as on-orbit inspections of the Crew Dragon spacecraft once it is docked at the space station to look for damage from micrometeoroids and orbital debris (MMOD). NASA pegs the overall risk of a loss of mission (LOM) as 1-in-60. That risk covers scenarios where the Crew Dragon does not reach the space station as planned, but the crew safely returns to Earth. NASA astronaut Kjell Lindgren was the sole backup crew member for the flight, backing up both Hurley and Behnken for the mission.

Prime crew

Position	Astronaut
Spacecraft commander	Douglas Hurley, NASA Expedition 63 Third spaceflight
Joint operations commander	Robert Behnken, NASA Expedition 63 Third spaceflight

Backup crew

Position	Astronaut
Spacecraft commander	Kjell Lindgren, NASA

Insignia and livery

Falcon 9 B1058.1 rolls out to the launch pad, bearing the NASA "worm" logo.

 

The mission insignia was designed by Andrew Nyberg, an artist from Brainerd, Minnesota, who is a nephew of spacecraft commander Hurley. The insignia features the logos of the Commercial Crew Program, Falcon 9, Crew Dragon, and the red chevron of NASA's "meatball" insignia. Also depicted are the American flag and a graphic representation of the ISS. The words NASA, SPACEX, HURLEY and BEHNKEN are printed around the border, along with the words FIRST CREWED FLIGHT and DM-2. The insignia outline is in the shape of the Crew Dragon capsule. The Falcon 9 rocket displays NASA's worm logo. This is the first time the logo has been used officially since it was retired in 1992. NASA TV and media coverage of the launch was branded as "Launch America", with its own logo.

Mission

Summary

The Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission was intended to complete the validation of crewed spaceflight operations using SpaceX hardware. If successful, the demonstration flight will allow for human-rating certification of the Crew Dragon spacecraft, the Falcon 9 rocket, the crew transportation system, the launch pad, and SpaceX's capabilities. The mission includes astronaut testing of Crew Dragon capabilities on orbit. The Crew Dragon capsule launched atop a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex 39A on 30 May 2020, and docked to pressurized mating adapter PMA-2 on the Harmony module of the ISS on 31 May 2020. It was the first American crewed launch of a space capsule since the ASTP Apollo. It was the first American-launched mission to deliver expedition crew to the ISS since STS-128, which saw Space Shuttle Discovery fly Nicole Stott to the ISS in August 2009. The first stage booster landed autonomously on the floating barge Of Course I Still Love You, which was prepositioned in the Atlantic Ocean. Docking and undocking operations were autonomously controlled by the Crew Dragon, but monitored by the flight crew in case manual intervention becomes necessary. Upon returning to Earth, the Crew Dragon capsule will splash down into the Atlantic Ocean, where it will be recovered by the GO Navigator recovery vessel.

Douglas Hurley and Robert Behnken will work alongside the crew of Expedition 63 for 30 to 90 days, meaning the landing of the spacecraft will occur no later than 28 August 2020. During their time aboard, Behnken is expected to conduct spacewalks with fellow American astronaut Chris Cassidy to replace batteries brought up by a Japanese cargo vehicle. The HTV-9 cargo vehicle was berthed on 25 May 2020, carrying the final set of six lithium-ion batteries to replace the aging nickel-hydrogen ones.

Preparations and launch

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine greet Behnken and Hurley at Kennedy, while wearing face masks and practicing social distancing amid the COVID-19 pandemic in the country.

 

US Vice President Mike Pence (left) and President Donald Trump (right) observe the launch from the ground.

 

The Crew Dragon Demo-2 mission was initially planned for launch in July 2019 as part of the Commercial Crew Development contract with a crew of two on a 14-day test mission to the ISS. The Crew Dragon capsule from the Crew Dragon Demo-1 mission was destroyed while its SuperDraco thrusters were undergoing static fire testing on 20 April 2019, ahead of its planned use for the in-flight abort test. SpaceX traced the cause of the anomaly to a component that leaked oxidizer into the high-pressure helium lines, which then solidified and damaged a valve. The valves have since been switched for burst discs to prevent another anomaly. On 19 January 2020, a Crew Dragon capsule successfully completed an in-flight abort test. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said on 9 April 2020 that he was "fairly confident" that astronauts could fly to the ISS aboard SpaceX's Crew Dragon spaceship at the end of May or in early June 2020, pending final parachute tests, data reviews and a training schedule that could escape major impacts from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

Tesla Model Xs with the numberplate ISSBND (ISS bound) transport the crew to the launchpad.

 

On 17 April 2020, NASA and SpaceX announced the launch date as 27 May 2020. The arrival of the Crew Dragon will raise the station's crew size from three to five. Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley will perform duties and conduct experiments as crew on board the ISS for several months, until the next Crew Dragon launch. Hurley and Behnken are expected to live and work aboard the space station for two or three months, and then return to Earth for a splash down in the Atlantic Ocean east of Cape Canaveral. NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine urged space enthusiasts not to travel to the Kennedy Space Center to view the launch and asked people to instead watch the launch on television or online. Bridenstine explained that maintenance crews are working in cohesive shifts, to mitigate workers' exposure to SARS-CoV-2. On 1 May 2020, SpaceX successfully demonstrated the Mark 3 parachute system, a critical milestone for the mission approval. Crew Dragon Demo-2 has marked the first crewed US spaceflight mission not to include the presence of the public at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As the mission was previously delayed, the Visitor Complex has opened as of 28 May 2020 with limited capacity for publicly viewing the launch. Admissions sold out almost immediately. To engage the public, notably the Class of 2020, who were unable to attend their graduations due to the COVID-19 pandemic, both NASA and SpaceX invited students and graduates to submit their photos to be flown to the ISS.

Play media

NASA TV coverage of the launch

 

Behnken and Hurley arrived at Kennedy Space Center on 20 May 2020 in preparation for the launch. On 21 May, the Falcon 9 rocket was rolled out to the launch pad, and a static fire test was conducted on 22 May 2020; a major milestone ahead of the launch. The mission used a Tesla Model X to transport Hurley and Behnken to LC-39A, the journey did not use Tesla Autopilot. An official launch weather forecast for Dragon Crew Demo-2 by the 45th Weather Squadron of the U.S. Space Force, for the original launch time at 20:33:33 UTC on 27 May 2020, predicted a 50% probability of favorable conditions. The launch was scrubbed at T−16:53 minutes due to thunderstorms and light rain in the area. The second launch attempt was successful and took place on 30 May 2020 at 19:22:45 UTC with a 50% probability of favorable conditions. The other launch windows were 31 May 2020 at 19:00:07 UTC, with a 60% probability of favorable conditions and 2 June 2020 at 18:13 UTC with a 70% probability of favorable conditions. President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, with their wives, were at Kennedy Space Center in Florida to see the launch attempt on 27 May 2020, and returned for launch on 30 May 2020, along with the Second Lady Karen Pence.

The launch live stream was watched online by 3 million people on NASA feeds, and the SpaceX feed peaked at 4.1 million viewers. NASA estimated roughly 10 million people watched on various online platforms, approximately 150,000 people gathered on Florida's space coast in addition to an unknown number watching on television.

All attempt times in Eastern Daylight Time (UTC−4).

Attempt	Planned	Result	Turnaround	Reason	Decision point	Weather go (%)	Notes
1	27 May 2020, 4:33:33 pm	Scrubbed	—	Weather	27 May 2020, 4:16 pm ​(T−16 min, 53 s hold)	50%	Decision to scrub launch made just before liquid oxygen loading for second stage, due to thunderstorms and light rain in the area caused by Tropical Storm Bertha following launch commit criteria.
2	30 May 2020, 3:22:45 pm	Success	2 days, 22 hours, 49 minutes			70%

Orbit and docking

Endeavour approaches the ISS, prior to docking.

 

Astronauts Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken revealed the name of their Crew Dragon spacecraft (capsule 206), Endeavour shortly after launch, reviving an old tradition from the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs where astronauts would name their spacecraft. It is the third US spacecraft named Endeavour, after the Space Shuttle orbiter of the same name built in 1991 to replace Space Shuttle Challenger, which was destroyed in 1986, and the Apollo command and service module used for the Apollo 15 mission in 1971. Hurley said that they chose Endeavour as both his and Behnken's first flights to space were on the Space Shuttle Endeavour. The craft spent 19 hours in orbit as it approached the ISS. As they approached the ISS, Hurley demonstrated the ability to pilot the spacecraft via its touchscreen controls until it reached a distance of 220 metres (720 ft) from the ISS docking ports, at which point they let the automated docking program take over. Endeavour docked with the ISS at 14:29 UTC on 31 May 2020. The hatch was opened and Hurley and Behnken boarded the ISS at 18:22 UTC. Hurley and Behnken joined the ISS Expedition 63 crew, which consists of NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and Russian cosmonauts Ivan Vagner and Anatoli Ivanishin. Hurley and Behnken are expected to stay on the ISS from six to sixteen weeks, depending on NASA's mission directives.

Timeline

Robert Behnken enters the ISS shortly after the Crew Dragon hatch opened.

• T+00:00 (19:22:45 UTC): the Crew Dragon spacecraft launched from Launch Complex 39A at Cape Canaveral, Florida.
• T+01:01: Max-Q was reached.
• T+02:38: MECO (main engine cutoff) occurred.
• T+02:40: Stage 1 separated from stage 2 of the rocket.
• T+07:19: Stage 1 of the rocket began its entry burn, slowing it down for entry into the atmosphere.
• T+08:50: SECO-1 (second engine cutoff 1) occurred.
• T+08:58: The stage 1 rocket began its landing burn, which slowed it down for touchdown at sea on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You.
• T+09:31: Stage 1 of the rocket landed on the drone ship.
• T+12:08: Crew Dragon separated from the second stage and began a course for the International Space Station.
• T+Unknown: Crew Dragon phase burn 1
• T+Unknown: Crew Dragon phase burn 2
• T+17:54:00: Crew Dragon reached Waypoint 1 for docking with the ISS.
• T+18:54:40: Initial soft docking with the ISS.
• T+21:39:00: Hatch opening
• T+24:??:??: Bob and Doug entered ISS
• T+?? days: ISS boost burn (minor)
• T+?? days: Undocking
• Undocking+1 day (?): Capsule return to Earth
• Landing+60 days: Planned mission end

Wake-up calls

NASA began a tradition of playing music to astronauts during the Gemini program, and first used music to wake up a flight crew during Apollo 15. Each track is specially chosen, often by the astronauts' families, and usually has a special meaning to an individual member of the crew, or is applicable to their daily activities.

Flight day	Song	Artist	Greeting	Played for	Links
Day 2	"Planet Caravan"	Black Sabbath			Video

Cure Violence

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cure_Violence 

 

Cure Violence Global

Founded	2000
Founder	Dr. Gary Slutkin
Focus	Health Approach to Violence Prevention
Location	Global
Area served	US/International
Method	Detecting & Interrupting Conflicts, Identifying & Treating High Risk Individuals and Changing Social Norms
Key people	Brent Decker, Chief Program Officer; Charles Ransford, Director of Science and Policy
Website	http://www.cvg.org

Cure Violence, founded by Epidemiologist Gary Slutkin, M.D. and ranked one of the top ten NGOs by NGO Advisor in 2019, is a public health anti-violence program. It aims to stop the spread of violence in communities by using the methods and strategies associated with disease control – detecting and interrupting conflicts, identifying and treating the highest risk individuals, and changing social norms.

History

Originally developed under the name "CeaseFire" in 2000, Slutkin launched the model in West Garfield, the most violent community in Chicago at the time. CeaseFire produced a 67 percent reduction in shootings in its first year. CeaseFire received additional funding from the State of Illinois in 2004 to immediately expand from 5 to 15 communities and from 20 to 80 Outreach Workers. That year, homicides declined in Chicago by 25 percent, to a total of 448, a rate of 15.5 homicides per 100,000 residents.

A three-year evaluation of the Chicago implementation by the U.S. Department of Justice in 2009 found shootings and killings were reduced by 41 percent to 73 percent [DJS -- ?], shooting hot spots were reduced in size and intensity, and retaliatory murders were eliminated. "A striking finding was how important CeaseFire loomed in their lives," the researchers stated in the report. "Clients noted the importance of being able to reach their outreach worker at critical moments — when they were tempted to resume taking drugs, were involved in illegal activities, or when they felt that violence was imminent." The lead evaluator commented that, "I found the statistical results to be as strong as you could hope for."

In response to the Chicago results, federal funding for the approach was made available in 2008 and new programs were started in Baltimore and New York City, which were also evaluated and found to be effective. The US State Department also funded a pilot program in Basr and Sadr City, Iraq, which was operational from 2008 to 2013 and conducted nearly 1,000 conflict mediations.

CeaseFire was reorganized and changed its name to Cure Violence in September 2012. Cure Violence now refers to the larger organization and overall health approach, while local program partner sites often operate under other names. In December, 2015, Cure Violence has 23 cities implementing the Cure Violence health approach in over 50 sites in the U.S. International program partner sites are operating in Trinidad, Honduras, Mexico, South Africa, Canada and Colombia.

Model

Cure Violence's founder and executive director, Gary Slutkin, is an epidemiologist and a physician who for ten years battled infectious diseases in Africa. He says that violence directly mimics infections like tuberculosis and AIDS, thus the treatment ought to follow the regimen applied to these diseases: go after the most infected, and stop the infection at its source.

Cure Violence approaches violence in an entirely new way: as a contagious disease that can be stopped using the same health strategies employed to fight epidemics. The Cure Violence model trains and deploys outreach workers and violence interrupters to mitigate conflict on the street before it turns violent. These interrupters are credible messengers, trusted members of the communities served, who use their street credibility to model and teach community members better ways of communicating with each other and how to resolve conflicts peacefully.

Cure Violence follows a three-pronged health approach to violence prevention : detection and interruption of planned violent activity, behavior change of high-risk individuals, and changing community norms.

Members of the community with credibility among the target population are hired and trained in the methods of mediation and behavior change and work to stop retribution from occurring or violence being created due to lack of communication and tense situations. One volunteer was interviewed for a BBC article and stated she defused situations by arranging funerals, bringing food, talking to and distracting the los due los japan (the leaders), bringing in community leaders, and stepping in at hospitals and rental complexes.

The Cure Violence method was developed using World Health Organization derived strategies and has won multiple awards. It has been promoted by the Institute of Medicine, the National League of Cities, U.S. Conference of Mayors, Department of Justice and was described in the Economist as "....the approach that will come to prominence." The program is currently being implemented by local partners with great success throughout the world.

Funding

Original funding for CeaseFire came from contributions from federal and state grants, and from local foundations and corporations, providing a $6.2 million budget for 2005 and $9.4 million for 2006.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation awarded CeaseFire a grant for the period 2007 to 2012. Today the organization is funded by fee-for-service for trainings and technical assistance as well as grants from governments and foundations.

Evaluation

In May 2008, Professor Wesley G. Skogan, an expert on crime and policing at Northwestern University, completed a three-year, independent, Department of Justice-funded report on CeaseFire, which found that the program successfully reduced shootings and killings by 41% to 73%. Retaliatory shootings were reduced 100% in five of the seven communities examined in the report.

In an independent evaluation of the Cure Violence model at the Baltimore partner program site commissioned by the Centers for Disease Control and conducted by Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore's Safe Streets program, the Cure Violence partner site, is credited with reducing shootings and killings by up to 34-56%. Community norm changes occurred, even with non-clients and reductions spread to surrounding communities.

Daniel Webster, co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, advocates for such an interventionist approach to violent crime, believing the benefits of Ceasefire's intercession are many. On CNN.com, Webster said, ""Violence is reciprocal. Stopping one homicide through mediation could buy you peace for months down the road."

The US Department of Justice Bureau of Justice Assistance contracted with the Center for Court Innovation to evaluate the Cure Violence New York City program partner site and found the gun violence rate in the program site to be 20% lower than what it would have been had its change mirrored the average change in comparison precincts.

John Jay College was contracted by several funders to conduct an extensive, independent evaluation on the Cure Violence approach in New York City, which found a reduction in violence, a shift in norms, and an improvement in police-community relations. The evaluation found a 37% to 50% reduction in gun injuries in the two communities examined. Additionally, the study found a 14% reduction in attitudes supporting violence (with no change in controls) and an increased confidence in police and increased willingness to contact police. A 2015 report found that the average homicide rate in NYC program neighborhoods fell by 18% while increasing an average 69% in comparison neighborhoods.

An evaluation of the program in Port of Spain, Trinidad conducted by Arizona State University and funded by the InterAmerican Development Bank found a 45% reduction in violent crime in the service area.

Cure Violence, however, has not been free of criticism. Dr. Malte Riemann cautioned that the model displays a neoliberal logic that runs the risk of ‘replacing political solutions with medical diagnosis and treatment models. This has depoliticizing effects as ‘violence becomes disentangled from socio-economic inequalities and explained by reference to individual pathology alone’. The possible limitations of the model’s extension to conflict resolution have also been discussed, especially the ‘risk of undermining the establishment of positive peace in a post-conflict environment‘.

Partners

National Sites: 

• Baltimore Safe Streets in Baltimore, Maryland
• Aim 4 Peace in Kansas City, Missouri
• Cure for Camden, Camden, New Jersey
• CeaseFire Illinois, Chicago
• CeaseFire New Orleans, Louisiana
• Operation SNUG in New York City
• Brooklyn/Crown Heights, New York City
• Operation SNUG in New York
• Cure Violence/NYC Mission Society, Harlem, New York City
• 49 Strong Saving Lives, Staten island
• Save our Streets, Bronx, New York City
• Cure Violence, South Jamaica, New York City
• CYO, Inc. in Oakland, California
• Philadelphia CeaseFire
• City of San Antonio- Stand Up SA
• Cease Violence, Wilmington, Delaware

International Sites:

• The Chaos Theory (The Safety Box) in London, UK
• CeaseFire Hanover Park (2 sites), in Hanover Park, Cape Town, South Africa
• The Citizen Security Program in Trinidad & Tobago
• Taller de Salud, Inc., Loiza Puerto Rico
• Cristo de la Roca in San Pedro Sula, Honduras
• Cure Violence plus PeaceTXT messaging to reduce election violence, Sisi Ni Amani-Kenya
• American Islamic Congress, 3 sites in Basrah and 2 sites in Sadr City-Baghdad, Iraq
• Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
• Barrio Positivo, Honduras
• CeaseFire Halifax, Canada

The Interrupters (2011 documentary)

The Interrupters is a film, produced in 2011 by Kartemquin Films, that documents the story of three CeaseFire outreach workers. It was directed and produced by Steve James, director of "Hoop Dreams" and also produced by Alex Kotlowitz, an author who first wrote about the organization for the New York Times Magazine in 2009. The film emphasizes the notion that much of the violence on the streets results from interpersonal conflict, rather than from gang-related disputes.

The film follows three interrupters—Ameena Matthews, Cobe Williams and Eddie Bocanegra. Ameena, the daughter of Jeff Fort—a major gang leader in the 1970s—spent time as a teen involved in a gang, and now takes to the streets to keep youths from doing the same. Ricardo "Cobe" Williams did three stints in jail for attempted murder and drug-related charges, and Eddie Bocanegra served 14 years in jail for a murder he committed at age 17.

The film premiered at 2011 Sundance. It aired as a PBS Frontline broadcast in February 2012.

Featured In

• A Path Appears: Transforming Lives, Creating Opportunity; Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
• Violence as a Public Health Problem: A Most Violent Year by Dr. Lloyd Sederer, Huffington Post, 12/9/2014
• Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla; David Kilcullen
• Beyond Suppression: Global Perspectives on Youth Violence; Joan Serra Hoffman, Lyndee Knox, and Robert Cohen
• Epidemiological Criminology: Theory to Practice; edited by Eve Waltermaurer, Timothy A. Akers
• “Violence Is a Contagious Disease“– by Dr. Gary Slutkin
• “Contagion of Violence“ – 2012 Institute of Medicine report
• “Cure Violence: A Disease Control Approach to Reduce Violence and Change Behavior” – by Charles Ransford, Candice Kane, and Gary Slutkin

Reparations for slavery

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reparations_for_slavery 

Reparations for slavery is a political justice concept that argues that reparations should be paid to the descendants of slaves from Sub-Saharan Africa who were trafficked to and enslaved in the Americas as a consequence of the Atlantic slave trade. The most notable demands for reparations have been made in the United Kingdom and the United States.

These reparations are hypothetical; that is, they have never been made. In contrast, some slave owners received compensated emancipation, the money that some governments paid some slave owners when slavery was abolished, as compensation for the loss of their property.

United States

Slavery ended in the United States in 1865 with the end of the American Civil War and the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which declared that, "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction". At that time, an estimated four million African Americans were set free.

Support for reparations

Within the political sphere, only one major bill demanding slavery reparations has been proposed, the "Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act," which former Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-MI) proposed unsuccessfully to the United States Congress every year from 1989 until his resignation in 2017. As its name suggests, the bill recommended the creation of a commission to study the "impact of slavery on the social, political and economic life of our nation".

In 2014, prominent American journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates published an article titled "The Case for Reparations", which discussed the continued effects of slavery and Jim Crow laws and made renewed demands for reparations. Coates makes reference to Rep. John Conyers Jr.'s aforementioned H.R.40 Bill, pointing out that Congress's failure to pass this bill expresses a lack of willingness to right their past wrongs.

In September 2016, the United Nations' Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent encouraged Congress to pass the aforementioned H.R.40 Bill to study reparations proposals, but the Working Group did not directly endorse any specific reparations proposal. The report noted that there exists a legacy of racial inequality in the United States, explaining that, "Despite substantial changes since the end of the enforcement of Jim Crow and the fight for civil rights, ideology ensuring the domination of one group over another, continues to negatively impact the civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights of African Americans today." The report notes that a "dangerous ideology of white supremacy inhibits social cohesion among the US population".

In 1999, African-American lawyer and activist Randall Robinson, founder of the TransAfrica advocacy organization, wrote that America's history of race riots, lynching, and institutional discrimination have "resulted in $1.4 trillion in losses for African Americans". Economist Robert Browne stated the ultimate goal of reparations should be to "restore the black community to the economic position it would have if it had not been subjected to slavery and discrimination". He estimates a fair reparation value anywhere between $1.4 to $4.7 trillion, or roughly $142,000 (equivalent to $153,000 in 2019) for every black American living today. Other estimates range from $5.7 to $14.2 and $17.1 trillion.

2020 presidential candidate endorsement for reparations

Andrew Yang said that he supports HR40 while speaking on the Karen Hunter show. 

In January 2019, Marianne Williamson detailed a plan for reparations in an interview for Ebony Magazine. 

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker have both indicated some level of support for reparations, according to NPR.

Tulsi Gabbard is a cosponsor of H.R.40, the only piece of legislation in Congress to study and develop reparations proposals and Bernie Sanders is a co-sponsor for the Senate version of the bill.

Kamala Harris declared in April 2019 she supports reparations.

Beto O'Rourke is "open to considering some form of reparations," according to U.S. News & World Report.

Tom Steyer in the 2020 Democratic Primaries Debate in South Carolina voiced his support for reparations.

Opposition to reparations

Opposition to slavery reparations is reflected in the general population. In a study conducted by YouGov in 2014, only 37% of Americans believed that slaves should have been provided compensation in the form of cash after being freed. Furthermore, only 15% believed that descendants of slaves should receive cash payments. The findings indicated a clear divide between black and white Americans on this issue. The study summarized their findings, noting: "Only 6% of white Americans support cash payments to the descendants of slaves, compared to 59% of black Americans. Similarly, only 19% of whites – and 63% of blacks – support special education and job training programs for the descendants of slaves."

In 2014, in response to Ta-Nehisi Coates's article, "The Case for Reparations", conservative journalist Kevin D. Williamson published an article titled "The Case Against Reparations." In it, Williamson argues: "The people to whom reparations are owed are long dead".

Another article opposing reparations to slavery was also published in 2014 by Canadian-American neoconservative political commentator David Frum.

United Kingdom

In 2004 descendants of Africans enslaved in America enlisted lawyer Ed Fagan in a class action lawsuit against insurance market Lloyd's of London, among other British and American corporations, stating that by insuring and financing the slaving ships they were complicit in genocide. The case was not successful. In Jamaica in 2004, a coalition of Rastafari movement and the Berber Moors who claim to have built the infrastructure of nations but never fully got paid for their building knowledge, and other groups argued that European countries formerly involved in the slave trade, especially Britain, should pay 72.5 billion pounds sterling to resettle 500,000 Jamaican Rastafarians in Africa. The claim was rejected by the British government, which said it could not be held accountable for wrongs in past centuries.

On 27 November 2006, British Prime Minister Tony Blair made a partial apology for Britain's role in the African slavery trade. However African rights activists denounced it as "empty rhetoric" that failed to address the issue properly. They feel his apology stopped shy to prevent any legal retort. Blair again apologized on 14 March 2007.

On 24 August 2007, Ken Livingstone (then Mayor of London) apologized publicly for London's role in the slave trade. "You can look across there to see the institutions that still have the benefit of the wealth they created from slavery", he said pointing towards the financial district, before breaking down in tears. He claimed that London was still tainted by the horrors of slavery. Jesse Jackson praised Mayor Livingstone, and added that reparations should be made.

Africa

In 1999, the African World Reparations and Repatriation Truth Commission called for the West to pay $777 trillion to Africa within five years.

In September 2001, the United Nations sponsored the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance held in Durban, South Africa. The Durban Review Conference sponsored a resolution stating that the West owed reparations to Africa due to the "racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance" that the Atlantic slave trade caused. Leaders of several African nations supported this resolution. The former Minister of Justice of Sudan, Ali Mohamed Osman Yassin, stated that the slave trade is responsible for the current problems plaguing Africa.

Caribbean

In 2007, Guyana President Bharrat Jagdeo formally called on European nations to pay reparations for the slave trade. President Jagdeo stated, "Although some members of the international community have recognized their active role in this despicable system, they need to go step further and support reparations." In 2014, the Parliament of Guyana established a "Reparations Committee of Guyana" to further investigate the impact of slavery and create formal demands for reparations.

In 2011, Antigua & Barbuda called for reparations at the United Nations, saying "that segregation and violence against people of African descent had impaired their capacity for advancement as nations, communities and individuals". More recently, in 2016, Ambassador of Antigua and Barbuda to the United States, Sir Ronald Sanders, called on Harvard University "to demonstrate its remorse and its debt to unnamed slaves from Antigua and Barbuda." According to Sanders, Isaac Royall Jr., who was the first endowed professor of law at Harvard, relied on the slaves on his plantation in Antigua when establishing Harvard Law School. Sanders recommended these reparations come in the form of annual scholarships for Antiguans and Barbudans.

In 2012, Jamaica revived its reparations commission, to consider the question of whether the country should seek an apology or reparations from Britain for its role in the slave trade. The opposition cited Britain's role in the end of the slave trade as a reason that Britain should issue no reparations.

Also in 2012, the Barbados government established a twelve-member Reparations Task Force, to be responsible for sustaining the local, regional and international momentum for reparations. Barbados is reportedly "currently leading the way in calling for reparations from former colonial powers for the injustices suffered by slaves and their families."

In 2013, in the first of a series of lectures in Georgetown, Guyana, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the 1763 Berbice Slave Revolt, Principal of the Cave Hill Campus of the University of the West Indies, Sir Hilary Beckles urged Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries to emulate the position adopted by the Jews who were persecuted during the Second World War and have since organized a Jewish reparations fund.

CARICOM Reparations Commission

Following Sir Hilary Beckles's advice, the CARICOM Reparations Commission (CRC) was created in September 2013. In 2014, 15 Caribbean nations unveiled the "CARICOM Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice" which spelled out demands for reparations from Europe "...for the enduring suffering inflicted by the Atlantic slave trade". Among these demands were formal apologies from all nations involved (as opposed to "statements of regret"), repatriation of displaced Africans to their homeland, programs to help Africans learn about and share their histories, and institutions to improve slavery descendants' literacy, physical health, and psychological health. Representatives of Caribbean states have repeatedly announced their intention to bring the issue to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). However, as of 2019 no action has been taken. Moreover, from the perspective of international law, it is disputed whether slavery, genocide and other crimes against humanity had been outlawed at the time they were committed in the Caribbean. As international law knows the principle of intertemporal law, in principle today's prohibitions cannot be applied retroactively. Still, some lawyers have argued that exceptions to the principle of intertemporal law are applicable in cases of crimes against humanity, as European states and their representatives could not expect slavery to be legal in the future (referred to as teleological reduction of the principle).

Police abolition movement

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_abolition_movement 

 

"Abolish the police" sign on an NYPD vehicle during the George Floyd protests.

 

The police abolition movement is a political movement in the United States which advocates replacing existing police forces with other systems of public safety. Police abolitionists believe that policing as a system is inherently flawed and cannot be reformed—a view which distinguishes the ideology from police reformists. While reformists seek to address the ways in which policing occurs, abolitionists seek to transform policing altogether through a process of disbanding, disempowering, and disarming the police. Abolitionists argue that because the institution of policing is deeply rooted in a history of white supremacy and settler colonialism and inseparable from the existing racial capitalist order, that a reformist reform approach to policing will always fail and that people therefore have an ethical obligation to be abolitionists.

Police abolition is a process which requires people to imagine alternatives to policing, deconstruct preconceived understandings of policing, resist co-option by reformists, and engage in and support practices which reduce police power, such as defunding the police. Amidst the George Floyd protests, Black Lives Matter and other activists used the phrase "defund the police" to call for police budget reductions, delegate certain police responsibilities to other organizations, or abolish police forces altogether. Some of these proposals have included diverting funds that would be spent on police to reinvest in community services instead. The phrase "fuck the police," which according to researchers David Correia and Tyler Wall "emerged as the unofficial motto" during the Rodney King riots, may be understood as a call for police abolition.

Ideology

Abolitionists argue that American policing is rooted in a history of colonialism and slavery. The first police organizations in the United States developed from early slave patrols.

 

Police abolition is founded on the fundamental principle that police as they exist in society are harmful to the people and must therefore be abolished. Abolitionists push back against reformists who, as Correia and Wall describe, "refuse to even consider that a world without police and private property might actually be a safer and more democratic world than the one we know today [and] never get tired of telling poor communities, routinely terrorized by police, to simply be patient, follow police orders, and work hard to escape the ghetto." Correia and Wall write that "whether in Detroit in 1967 or Ferguson in 2014, insurgent movements of poor Black and Brown people know that police reform always leads to more criminalization, harassment, arrest, and police killing in their communities." As described by James Baldwin, the "pious calls to 'respect the law,' always to be heard from prominent citizens each time the ghetto explodes, are so obscene." Baldwin asserted an anti-reformist stance, noting that, poverty and police violence in Black communities will continue "no matter how many liberal speeches are made, no matter how many lofty editorials are written, no matter how many civil rights commissions are set up."

Abolitionists identify that policing in the United States is rooted in colonialism and slavery and therefore cannot be reformed. As summarized by Mahesh Nalla and Graeme Newman: "Many policing problems plagued the new cities of America. They included controlling certain classes, including slaves and Indians; maintaining order; regulating specialized functions such as selling in the market, delivering goods, making bread, packing goods for export; maintaining health and sanitation; ensuring the orderly use of the streets by vehicles; controlling liquor; controlling gambling and vice; controlling weapons; managing pests and other animals." Early policing in America had little to do with crime control and was performed by groups of "volunteer citizens who served on slave patrols or night watches," as recorded by Victor Kappeler and Larry Gaines. Modern police organizations in the United States were developed from these early slave patrols and night watches. For example, "New England settlers appointed Indian constables to police Native Americans," while "in 1704 the colony of Carolina developed the nation's first slave patrol," organized groups which would go on to exist in southern and northern states.

For abolitionists, abolishing the police is directly related to abolishing prisons. As stated by Marbre Stahly-Butts, "cops are actually the operators and the front lines of mass incarceration. Without cops, we don't have mass incarceration, we don't have any incarceration." Even police and prison abolition is considered by abolitionists as "not a definitive end, because police and prisons lie at the heart of the capitalist state, which is always evolving, adapting, and reconstituting itself in response to resistance and insurgency." As stated by Luis Fernandez, professor of criminology, "asking the question 'what are alternatives to policing?' is to ask the question 'what are alternatives to capitalism?'" Fernandez identifies that "the role of the police is to maintain the capitalist social order, to maintain the social order so that those particular people who have power can do their business with the least amount of disruption... possible." From this perspective, abolition of the police and prisons in the United States is inherently intertwined with undoing the racial capitalist order. As stated by Joshua Briond for Hampton Institute, "Black death is a necessity of racial capitalism and the institutions (such as policing and prisons) that exist to uphold it." As a result, Briond concludes that "the only realistic solution to a reality in which anti-Black terror, violence, and death is an inevitability to the functionality of a system, is abolition."

Abolition as a process

Police abolitionists see abolition as a process of disbanding, disempowering, and disarming the police in the transition to a society without police. This may take several forms for abolitionists, such as imagining alternatives to policing, directly challenging the legitimacy and roles of policing, resisting liberal attempts to co-opt, incorporate, or reconcile the uncompromising objective to abolish the police, and engaging in practices which undermine the authority and power of the police, such as the defunding the police. As stated by academic Alex Vitale, police abolition is a process, rather than a singular event:

Well, I'm certainly not talking about any kind of scenario where tomorrow someone just flips a switch and there are no police. What I'm talking about is the systematic questioning of the specific roles that police currently undertake, and attempting to develop evidence-based alternatives so that we can dial back our reliance on them. And my feeling is that this encompasses actually the vast majority of what police do. We have better alternatives for them. Even if you take something like burglary — a huge amount of burglary activity is driven by drug use. And we need to completely rethink our approach to drugs so that property crime isn't the primary way that people access drugs. We don't have any part of this country that has high-quality medical drug treatment on demand. But we have policing on demand everywhere. And it's not working.

Creating alternatives

Police abolition, similar to prison abolition, has often been framed as inconceivable or a "far away dream." In opposition to this position, abolitionists support imagining, recognizing, and affirming alternatives to policing. Activist Tourmaline references Andrea Ritchie to explain how "people act with abolitionist politics all the time, without actually knowing it." Ritchie presented the following example to illustrate this point: "You and your friend are at a bar. Your friend drove there. Your friend wants to drive home. Are you gonna call the cops or are you going to say 'no, I'll drive you home; I'll call a cab; I will take your keys'?" Tourmaline states that this is an example of "abolition at work," since "people are not constantly calling the cops on their friends to prevent them from drunk driving; people are finding unique and creative ways to get their friends from not driving while they're drunk."

In response, lawyer and activist Dean Spade states that "it seems like a big part of an example like that is the difference between how we feel about somebody we know—like, you're about to commit a crime, you're about to get in a car and drive drunk, but it never occurs to me that I should call the cops on you, because I don't see you as disposable, I know you—versus, [a scenario where] there's strangers on the subway and somebody's doing something that someone doesn't like and instead of figuring out what's going on or [questioning] can this be stopped, can this be less harmful, or can people get taken care of, there's a kind of immediate" response to make it "into a police problem." Spade identifies that this occurs because of the ways in which "people are alienated from one another in our culture" which has made it "not okay" socially to "connect and try to figure out how to solve the problem" together. Joshua Briond states that "the lack of political imagination, beyond the electoral strategy and reformism, and the inability to envision a world, or even country, devoid of police and prisons is rooted in (anti-Black), racialized colonial logics of the biologically determined criminal, slave, and savage."

Marbre Stahly-Butts argues that the reason alternative systems to policing are not more widely accepted or adopted is because they are not supported or funded. In the face of violent situations, Stahly-Butts expresses that, without any existing alternative, policing is often understood as the only system one can call upon: "you and I both know that calling the police right now is not going to help this situation and we also know that we don't know what else to do." Stahly-Butts refers to this as the most difficult part of abolitionist work, because it calls upon people to build different types of support systems and experiment with strategies to replace a failed system of policing which has been legitimized and overfunded by society. This work presents numerous challenges: "And the minute you try something new and it doesn't work, they're like 'See, I told you. That shit don't work.' And you're like, 'But this [the existing system] has not been working for decades.'" Stahly-Butts concludes that creating support systems to address these issues "is the hardest part, and it is that experimentation that we have to really lean into."

Delegitimizing the police

Abolitionists identify that delegitimizing the police as an institution of society and deconstructing the logic of policing are necessary towards actualizing police abolition. Megan McDowell and Luis Fernandez state that "by attacking the police as an institution, by challenging its very right to exist, the contemporary abolitionist movement contains the potential to radically transform society." Rachel Herzing expresses that abolitionists must be engaged in "fundamentally disrupting the idea that law enforcement is necessary in any way." As Herzing argues, "Cops are not natural features of our landscape. Cops do not need to exist, and policing does not need to exist. There is no thing that happens in the natural world of human beings that requires that of us."

Part of delegitimizing the police for abolitionists is exposing that the institution of policing is not "broken" when violence occurs, but is working as intended. Dylan Rodriguez expresses that police violence must be understood, not as recurring instances of what is commonly referred to as police brutality, but rather as state-sanctioned violence that is inherently embedded in police practice. As a result, Rodriguez argues that policing is an inhuman institution and that police occupy an inhuman position: "I didn't say it was subhuman; it's inhuman. To have the power behind a badge to act as the agent of the state, to execute fatal violence on the basis of your own judgment, is an inhuman practice. To inhabit that power is inhuman." Marbre Stahly-Butts explains that police were invented as slave patrols in the south and to suppress unionization in the north, and subsequently argues that the purpose of police as an institution is "to police and patrol, and to subject and to oppress, Black, brown, and poor communities; they still do that. They leave rich people alone." Rachel Herzing argues that policing "is not about protecting and serving, it is not about crime fighting, it's about containment and control."

Dean Spade states that "clearly US policing has been having a major legitimacy crisis because of the Black Lives Matter movement." However, Spade cites Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Craig Gilmore's article "Beyond Bratton" in Policing the Planet in order to express how legitimacy crises historically have often actually resulted in the expansion of policing: "In the U.S., after the crisis in the 1960s and 70s that was provoked by the Black Panther Party, the Young Lords, and so many different anti-racist and anti-colonial movements calling out the police and more people seeing police violence and seeing the police as racist, the police just did a lot of new PR moves, like they expanded police to have police be homeless outreach workers and to have police go into every classroom in the United States and do a drug abuse education program called D.A.R.E." As a result, Spade concludes that "the idea that just because we provoke a [legitimacy] crisis we'll get a reduction or elimination is something we have to really question."

Resisting co-option

Abolitionists believe that calls for abolition may be co-opted and drained of their power by reformists who propose reforms which actually function to strengthen police power. Megan McDowell and Luis Fernandez state that abolitionist praxis which "adopts uncompromising positions that resist liberal attempts at co-optation, incorporation, and/or reconciliation" should be adopted and amplified. The Ferguson unrest reform proposal of body cameras for police has been cited as an example of a reformist approach to policing which worked to strengthen police power and build wealth for the less than lethal weapons industry while failing to provide material relief to those impacted by police violence. Dean Spade argues that "the goal of those kinds of reforms is to demobilize us, to tell us 'your problem has been solved' [...] and that is so important for us to deeply resist." Tourmaline argues that this process of expecting the state to reduce harm and violence through increasing policing is embedded within the state's attempts to maintain its own legitimacy and power: "the logic of the state is constantly demanding us to think of ways to increase policing as a way to decrease harm and violence."

Rachel Herzing identifies that reformist approaches to policing come from "state actors," which she refers to as "people and institutions that have an investment in there being a police force, in there being law enforcement," and that are otherwise invested in containing and controlling certain types of people to maintain their own power: "I think we fool ourselves if we believe that a mayor, or a DA, or a city attorney, or a chief of police, is going to have different interests than maintaining some level of containment and control." Herzing identifies that this has a direct relationship to the types of reforms that are offered and expresses that abolitionists should be aware of the conditions they are operating in as a result:

We have to understand the conditions that we're fighting in and we have to understand who the players are in those conditions. Are we operating on terrain in which the state has invested interest in some people being controlled? If we are, then that's what they're going to offer us. And just because that's what they offer us, doesn't mean that's what we have to accept. We get sometimes caught up in this like 'Well, the city said that they'll train people, or that they'll put more Black cops on the force [...] or that we'll have cops from our neighborhoods, and that's going to fix everything.' If we understand what their goals are, what they want, what their trying to get, we don't have to accept it. We can say, 'Well actually we want this: We want less violence on our streets and we see you as being directly in relationship to putting violence workers, what some people call cops [...] on the street. [So] you cannot expect anything different.' And so I think it's up to us to understand the terrain that we're on, what our endgame is, and what the endgame is of the other players on that terrain.

Divest and invest

A demonstrator at a June 2020 George Floyd protest holds up a sign calling for defunding the police, a step in police abolition.

 

Defunding the police may be interpreted as a step towards abolition, by using funds allocated to police to invest in community initiatives intended to reduce crime and therefore the need for policing over time until the institution is fully abolished. Activist and advocacy groups like Movement 4 Black Lives call for "divest/invest" programs to divert police budgets into programs that have been proven to reduce crime. In many US cities the police department is the largest single budget item. In Oakland, California, the police budget is over 40% of the city's discretionary spending.

Defunding the police frees up funds to invest in community initiatives intended to reduce crime and therefore the need for policing. According to Patrisse Cullors, co-founder of Black Lives Matter, "We're ready to chip away at the line items inside of a police budget that really are nonsensical. Police should not be in charge of mental health crises. They should not be in charge of dealing with homelessness. They should not be in charge of 'supporting' people with drug dependency and addiction. Those are three line items which we can cut out of the police budget and then put that back into health care." In Eugene, Oregon, a nonprofit mobile crisis intervention program called CAHOOTS has handled mental health calls since 1989 and is often cited as a model for an alternative to police handling mental health calls. In 2019 CAHOOTS responded to 20% of Eugene's 911 calls on a budget of $2 million.

History

The United States established its first militarized police force in Pennsylvania in 1905, directly influenced by imperialist American warfare conducted by the Philippine Constabulary, with explicit intention of suppressing "foreigners." The Pennsylvania State Police were created by Samuel W. Pennypacker, who intended for the force to serve as a means "to crush disorders, whether industrial or otherwise, which arose in the foreigner-filled districts of the state." Virtually all of the officers were drawn from the U.S. military, many coming directly from the Constabulary. While the state police force was "supposedly statewide" in name, "the force was actually deployed in four troops to cover the mining districts," which were highly populated by "foreigners." Nearly all of the troopers were "American born and their motto was 'One American can lick a hundred foreigners.'" They referred to themselves as the Black Hussars and were referred to colloquially as "Cossacks."

As early as 1906, the state police were already stirring resentment by shooting labor strikers and escaping any accountability. In 1906, troopers shot twenty strikers in Mount Carmel. Although the lieutenant in command was arrested for assault and battery, "the state exonerated him and his men of all charges." Governor Pennypacker expressed support, stating that the troopers had "established a reputation which has gone all over the Country... with the result that the labor difficulties in the Anthracite coal region entirely disappeared." The state police were commonly called in to suppress labor strike activity, used as a weapon of the elite class in Pennsylvania, regularly escaping any repercussions for their actions. As stated by Jesse Garwood, "A [state] policeman can arrest anybody, anytime." The United Mine Workers "pressed for the abolition of this 'Cossack' force," but retreated during World War I when more transformative labor organizing from the International Workers of the World (IWW) arose in the region. Although they had supported abolition for nearly a decade, the United Mine Workers were satisfied when a raid was conducted on an IWW meeting in 1916 in Old Forge. All 262 people present were arrested, and "after the release of some undercover informants, the rest were sentenced to thirty days."

Immigration to the United States heavily declined in 1914, which resulted in some mining communities becoming more "Americanized." As a result, "Pennsylvania's industrial belt was no longer a land of cultural deviance, but just another rural slum." A wider police abolitionist movement had emerged as a response to the violence inflicted by the public police and the private coal and iron police during a series of armed labor strikes and conflicts known as the Coal Wars (1890-1930). Throughout the period, there were numerous reports of miners being severely beaten and murdered by the public and private police. State police fired indiscriminately into "tent cities," which resulted in the "killing or wounding of women and children," and numerous sexual assault and rapes committed by officers became common. After the firsthand witnessing of the beating of a 70-year-old citizen, American trade unionist James H. Maurer proposed legislation to abolish the public Pennsylvania State Police.

In 1928, the ACLU issued a pamphlet entitled "The Shame of Pennsylvania," declaring that thousands of public and private police had been "allowed to abuse their power without inquiry or punishment," yet ultimately concluded that, without a "fearless governor," abolishing the police was "not conceivable." In 1929, the murder of Polish émigré miner John Barcoski eventually resulted in the abolishment of Pennsylvania's private anti-labor Coal and Iron Police system in 1931. Barcoski was beaten to death by three officers employed by American banker Richard Beaty Mellon's Pittsburgh Coal Company. James Renshaw Cox, who worked with a coalition of civic, labor, and religious leaders to abolish the private police, referred to the agency as "tyranny by the wealthy industrial people."

Contemporary responses

Support

The contemporary police abolition movement began at least as early as 2014 during the Ferguson riots but gained strength in 2020 during the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and the protests surrounding it. According to the New York Times, cities across the United States were considering defunding, downsizing, or abolishing their departments in the Floyd aftermath.

A 2018 statement by the American Public Health Association recommended addressing police violence as a public health issue, calling for government agencies "to add death and injury by legal intervention to their list of reportable conditions," conduct research on law enforcement violence, and divert funding from police to "community-based programs that address violence and harm without criminalizing communities, including restorative justice programs."

In 2019, following a campaign by advocacy group Durham Beyond Policing, the city council of Durham, North Carolina, voted against hiring 18 new officers in favor of considering a "community safety and wellness task force" instead. Minneapolis in 2019 redirected a budget intended for 8 new police officers to an office of violence prevention.

In Los Angeles, following a campaign by a coalition of community groups including Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti on June 3, 2020, announced budget cuts of $250 million, representing 7% of the department budget, a reversal of his planned increase of $120 million. Garcetti announced the funds would be redirected to community initiatives.

In Milwaukee, an activist group called African-American Roundtable, formed by 65 organizations, asked the city to divert $75 million from the police budget to public health and housing.

In Minneapolis, Activist groups Reclaim the Block and Black Visions Collective requested the police budget be cut by $45 million. Advocacy group MPD150, which had previously published a report recommending the MPD be abolished in 2017, argued that "the people who respond to crises in our community should be the people who are best-equipped to deal with those crises" and that first responders should be social workers and mental health providers. Public schools, parks, multiple private businesses and venues, and the University of Minnesota have severed ties with the police department. In a show of popular support, Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey was booed by a large crowd after refusing to defund and abolish the police.

In Nashville on June 2, 2020, a city budget hearing lasted over ten hours to accommodate the large numbers of residents waiting to take their turn to ask the city to defund the police.

In New York City in April 2020 activists and lawmakers asked Mayor Bill de Blasio to use cuts to the police budget to make up for shortfalls caused by the 2020 coronavirus pandemic. In June, during the Floyd protests, a group of 48 candidates for city office asked the city council to reduce the NYPD budget by $1 billion over four years. Brooklyn College's Policing and Social Justice Project called for the same reduction. City comptroller Scott Stringer said the city could save $1.1 billion over four years by cutting the numbers of police and reducing overtime and could divert the funds to “social workers, counselors, community-based violence interrupters, and other trained professionals."

Supporting studies

A 2017 study found that proactive policing, defined as "systematic and aggressive enforcement of low-level violations" has a positive correlation to reports of major crime. The authors studied a period in 2014 and 2015 when the NYPD, during a political dispute between demonstrators protesting the death of Eric Garner and the police union, held a work slowdown. According to the study's abstract:

Officers were ordered to respond to calls only in pairs, leave their squad cars only if they felt compelled, and perform only the most necessary duties. The act was a symbolic show of strength to demonstrate the city's dependence on the NYPD. Officers continued to respond to community calls for service, but refrained from proactive policing by refusing to get out of their vehicles to issue summonses or arrest people for petit crimes and misdemeanours.

The study found that during and for a short while after the police slowdown, reports of major crimes decreased.

Among U.S. politicians

Police reforms in Minneapolis after the 2015 police shooting of Jamar Clark added a "duty to intervene" when an officer saw a colleague doing something to endanger a member of the public; the new policy was "key to the swift firing and arrest of the four officers" in the Floyd case. However, according to council member Alondra Cano, "the fact that none of the officers took the initiative to follow the policy to intervene, it just became really clear to me that this system wasn't going to work, no matter how much we threw at it." City council member Steven Fletcher suggested the city "disband the MPD [Minneapolis Police Department] and start fresh with a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach capacity." Council member Jeremiah Ellison said "We are going to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department, and when we're done, we're not simply gonna glue it back together. We are going to dramatically rethink how we approach public safety and emergency response. Council president Lisa Bender also called for dismantling the department. U.S. representative Ilhan Omar stated, “the Minneapolis Police Department has proven themselves beyond reform. It's time to disband them and reimagine public safety in Minneapolis."

In New York City in June 2020, city council member Daniel Dromm of Queens said the police response to peaceful demonstrators in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd showed that efforts to reform the city's police department had not worked, saying "The culture in the New York City Police Department has not changed. The white shirts, the commanding officers, they kind of get it and talk the talk, but the average beat cop doesn't believe in it and we've seen this over and over again."

In Charlotte, North Carolina, city council member Braxton Wilson said "there's always been a political ability to make these changes. It just seems that we may be in a moment where people that are in positions like mine are finally getting the political will."

Criticism

US President Donald Trump on June 4, 2020, tweeted "The Radical Left Democrats new theme is “Defund the Police”. Remember that when you don’t want Crime, especially against you and your family. This is where Sleepy Joe is being dragged by the socialists. I am the complete opposite, more money for Law Enforcement! #LAWANDORDER".

According to economist Glenn Loury, abolishing public police services would lead to a surge in private security services, contrary to what is desired by police abolitionists.