In this day and age, police violence—particularly against African-Americans, LGBTQ people, youth, people with mental illness, and undocumented immigrants—is impossible to ignore. As people who have little personal experience with these tragedies become conscious of the frequency and pervasiveness of assaults and killings by law enforcement officers, some are starting to wonder: In an emergency, are there alternatives to calling the police?
“The content here can really push us and our boundaries, and our understanding of safety, and therefore it can lead us to some difficult conversations,” Steph, one of the workshop leaders who didn’t want to be identified by her last name, told the group. “The idea of a brave space is we need to move beyond ideas of staying safe, because when we are safe we do not push ourselves to grow and change. Oftentimes in ‘safe spaces’ . . . we confuse feelings of discomfort for feelings of being unsafe, and that can keep us from growing.”
Most people had either never called the police or called in situations such as automobile accidents when it seemed impossible not to dial 911. Others recalled phoning when they saw distressed motorists on the highway or heard what seemed like domestic violence in their neighbors’ homes. “I was socialized to call the police if there were three teenagers hanging out anywhere,” one woman volunteered.
And what do you do if there are no alternative services and agencies in your neighborhood? In an interview with the Reader last year, Pat Hill—a former police officer and head of the African-American Police League, who passed away in September—noted how Chicago’s black community came to rely on the police for all sorts of social services as black neighborhoods became increasingly impoverished in the 1970s and ’80s. With the disappearance of jobs and opportunities, and with them a neighborhood safety net of institutions, it seemed to Hill that people had no alternatives other than calling the cops. And the police, increasingly the only city institution left to serve poor neighborhoods, have never been adequately trained to answer the social service calls they’re increasingly tasked with. Instead, as the DOJ notes in its investigation and reporters have steadily documented for decades, CPD is plagued by a culture that allows officers to consider themselves at war with the community rather than existing to protect and serve.
