As a former Hill staffer, I know how the sausage gets made: the backroom deals, the pet projects, and the extreme partisanship. Our current moment requires far more than the ego, moderation, and compromise that is typically reflected in federal legislation. This country’s recognition — finally — of the devastation and destruction that comes from the over-policing and over-criminalization of Black bodies and communities warrants real, meaningful change. The acknowledgment that Black Lives Matter — finally — demands bold and visionary leadership at the national level.

That audacious vision is divestment. We must stop investing in racist and brutal policing systems. Instead, we must start resourcing the Black and Brown communities that have been harmed by these “law and order” institutions. Elected officials must dramatically reduce law enforcement budgets and put that savings into systems that could enfranchise Black and Brown people — housing, education, employment, and health care. And providing full access to these segments of our society means removing police from them. School discipline, mental health crises, and homelessness should not be met with a police response.

Divesting from police must happen at all levels of government. At the federal level, divestment looks like an end to the Department of Defense’s 1033 program, which gives law enforcement military weapons and equipment that are used against communities and protestors. It is an end to COPS grants that put police in schools and fuel the school to prison pipeline. Divestment is prohibiting Byrne JAG dollars from being used to continue low-level arrests, the failed drug war, and the destruction of Black and Brown communities. These dollars can and need to be better spent.

We know what policies and practices will not work because we have been here before. Michael Brown. Eric Garner. Breonna Taylor. George Floyd. The list of names does not stop here. Their lives deserve more than hashtags and slogans. They deserve much more than what elected officials have done to date. Members of Congress cannot continue to throw taxpayer money at another commission or study to determine the failings of law enforcement. Federal dollars cannot support more training, more technical assistance, more “checking the box” in the name of reforming the police.

The federal government must invest in state and local communities differently. It must get out of the business of funding arrests and incarceration. And in the limited instances in which there would be law enforcement and community encounters, there must be measures to protect against police violence and ensure accountability when there is misconduct. Congress must model a national use of force standard that makes deadly force a rare, last resort. This respect for the sanctity of life must also be reflected in federal laws that prohibit the use of chokeholds and carotid holds. And if these laws are violated, there must be transparent and certain policies with which to hold police responsible.   

As we mourn and protest the Black lives lost, 21st Century policing should look dramatically different than the current status quo. If federal lawmakers are truly up for taking on the country’s entrenched, racist, and violent policing systems, born out of slave patrols, they have the vocal and organized backing of constituents to get this done. Now is not the time to dust off old bills and offer them as the way forward. Now is the time for divestment.

Kanya Bennett, Senior Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office

Journalists covering protests against police brutality across the country are facing an influx of violence, suppression efforts, and arrests by police. Since the George Floyd protests began, there have been more than 400 claims of aggressions against the press, according to the U.S. Press Freedom tracker. Violations include being assaulted with pepper spray and rubber bullets, dealing with damaged equipment, and even facing arrest. This week, At Liberty is joined by Jared Goyette, a freelance reporter who was hit in the eye with a police projectile while covering a protest in Minneapolis. 

“There’s always been a degree of tension between police, protesters, and media,” said Goyette of the protest at which he was attacked. “They are tense environments…But based on my experience in these types of events, this was markedly different than anything I’d seen before. It was different by the degree of the lack of clear communication. And it was different in the degree to which the projectiles coming from police seemed continuous, and to some degree arbitrary.”

Goyette is now the named plaintiff in a lawsuit the ACLU of Minnesota filed last week against the City of Minneapolis, seeking justice for the violence he and other journalists experienced covering the protests.

“There’s a feeling of just being in a historic and important moment and wanting to do as good a job as possible to document it,” Goyette told At Liberty. “And there’s just so much happening at once. As journalists, we’re doing the best we can.”
 

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Policing the Press: A Journalist on the Frontlines

Journalists covering protests against police brutality across the country are facing an influx of violence, suppression efforts, and arrests by police…

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I never expected to get an abortion. But I knew I could tell my mother. I grew up in New York and abortion was still illegal when I was born. One of my earliest memories is being in the car with my mother when she turned to me and told me that if I ever needed an abortion, I should let her know, because she “knew a lot of doctors.” My mother survived the Holocaust by hiding in a Catholic boarding school in the South of France. Her parents were active in the Jewish French resistance, and my grandmother helped my grandfather escape from Beaune-la-Rolande, a French-run Nazi transit camp which fed Jews to Auschwitz. My mother knew a thing or two about defying unjust laws. 
 
Any day now, the U.S. Supreme Court is due to hand down its decision on an unjust law in Louisiana. The Court’s decision in June Medical v. Russo could drastically alter the ability of people in the United States to access abortion. June Medical involves a law in Louisiana that requires doctors at abortion clinics to have admitting privileges at a local hospital. This is so even though abortion is one of the safest medical procedures and admitting privileges for abortion providers have no correlation to women’s safety. If left in place, Louisiana will be left with one doctor in the entire state permitted to perform abortions. One doctor to serve the 1 million women of reproductive age in Louisiana. The politicians in Louisiana justify this law as “protecting women’s health,” even while Louisiana has the highest maternal death rate in the country. The politicians also ignore that autonomy is intrinsic to health. Women cannot be healthy if we cannot control our destiny. And the Supreme Court does not need to overturn Roe v. Wade to make abortion an impossibility for millions of women. Already, abortion access is dying the death of a thousand cuts. As of 2017, 89 percent of counties in the U.S. lacked an abortion provider, and 38 percent of women of reproductive age lived in a county without a clinic.
 
If I had not been able to control my reproductive life, I do not think I would have been able to craft my resulting career. When I unexpectedly became pregnant in my twenties, I was just starting out in my legal career, and not ready personally or professionally to be a parent. When I was more settled, I did have two wonderful children. I dedicated my professional life to fighting gender-based violence. I worked for more than 20 years as a legal aid lawyer representing low-income domestic violence survivors (some of whom were prevented by their partners from getting abortions), and then joined the local government in my city to improve policies on intimate partner violence and human trafficking. And now I get to fight for reproductive rights at the mothership — the ACLU of Southern California. 
 
Even though I had my abortion over 25 years ago, and I have never hidden it from friends and family, this past year is the first time that I have spoken publicly about it. I feel obligated to normalize this experience — to add my story to the multitude of others that show how many people have exercised their right to have an abortion, and how our lives were saved by this ability. I am privileged to be able to share my story with support from my personal and work families, and I recognize that not all people enjoy this option. I feel impelled to speak out since I can, particularly since so many others cannot. One in four women in the United States will get an abortion in their lifetime, but many don’t feel they can talk about it.
 
Access to abortion enables us to control our destiny, to be truly free. I was privileged from a young age to know that I would always be able to control that destiny — because my parents knew doctors; because I had a job that gave me health insurance; because I lived in a state that protected my rights. But it shouldn’t matter where you work, what your ZIP code is, or whom your parents know, to be free. Let’s hope the Supreme Court doesn’t leave freedom to the states.

Minouche Kandel, Senior Staff Attorney, ACLU of Southern California