Jeanne,We wanted to reach out in light of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act (JPA) passing the House, recently. The bill will now head to the Senate. M4BL cannot support JPA. The bill is fundamentally flawed. There can be no justice in policing — a system born of white supremacy and slave patrols. What we need is bold reimagining of community safety. We need justice for our people, NOT in policing.JPA dumps new money into the very systems that have always served to kill, cage, and destroy the families of Black people. JPA trusts law enforcement to fix policing and earmarks funds for police departments instead of making the bold investments necessary to create real safety for all people, and especially Black communities.
JPA invests nearly $1 billion into incrementalist reforms that fail time and time again instead of boldly reimagining who and what really keeps us safe. It wasn’t a no-knock warrant that killed Breonna Taylor. It was the war on drugs and the political decision to criminalize Black and Brown communities instead of providing the resources they need to thrive. More body cameras wouldn’t have saved George Floyd. The cops that killed him were wearing body cameras.
Jeanne, thank you for being one of the 165,000 community co-sponsors of the BREATHE Act. When we wrote this legislative love letter to Black people, we set out to create legislation that truly responded to the calls from the streets this summer. JPA doesn’t answer that call.
The provisions it contains would not have saved George Floyd’s life, the bill’s namesake. The mandate from the streets was to boldly reimagine public safety and meaningfully invest in our communities. That vision is realized in the BREATHE Act.
You’ve helped us get this far. Now we need your help, again. Congress ignored the hundreds of thousands of us that called for the BREATHE Act this summer. Instead of listening to our calls from the streets, they dismissed our bill as too ambitious. A pipe dream. An impractical “defund” bill. They ignored what our communities really need and passed JPA.
M4BL is a national network of over 150 organizations creating a broad political home for Black people to learn, organize, and take action.
In July of 2020, during the Freedom Summer, we unveiled the BREATHE Act, a visionary federal Civil Rights bill that would divest from policing and invest in a new vision of public safety. For decades, the federal government has funded mass criminalization while underfunding social services that actually keep people safe. Black people and our allies are demanding a new approach. The BREATHE Act is an affirmative vision for our lives.TAKE ACTION TODAY »
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