The Young Democrats of Emory hosted a panel on Sept. 15 to delve into the deep-rooted history of policing in America and its connection to the Black Lives Matter movement and the pandemic.
The panel, which included Associate Professor of Sociology Alyasah Sewell, Candler School of Theology Associate Professor of Christian Ethics Elizabeth Bounds and third-year Candler student Darrin Sims (21T), began the conversation by rectifying misconceptions about defunding the police.
The defund movement is an effort to “refund the social and health systems that also can solve these same problems,” Sewell said.
Arguing that police reform is a bipartisan issue, Sims noted that the only difference between police reform, defunding and abolition is “a point of imagination.”
“How can we imagine different ways of protecting people?” Sims asked. “How can we imagine different ways of spending our money? How can we imagine different ways of building community with one another?”
While Sims believes police abolition is challenging, he questioned how society should shape law enforcement policy. Sewell and Bounds called out systemic repression as a limit of society’s imagination and outlined the way in which history repeats itself.
“We’ve recreated systems of bondage,” Sewell said. “We’ve called them fancy things [like] poverty, tracking … right now we’re talking about the criminal justice system.”
Reform is only possible when police truly start to implement changes in practice, not just on paper, Sims said.
“There are people in this world right now who are living without police and are thriving,” Sims said. “It’s a question that absolutely can happen.”
Sims detailed how communities can build power through models presented in history, placing emphasis on education of the masses, especially the youth, to empower the people. He also praised Georgians for their civic engagement as some incarcerated people exercise their right to vote and young people provide transportation to those who require assistance.
When it comes to everyday citizens, Sewell encouraged people to document injustices that they experience because “the people who are most likely to press record are the most disenfranchised.”
Bounds credited the momentum of the civil rights movement to its media publicity in the 1960s and connected it to how the publicized death of George Floyd sparked a revitalization of the Black Lives Matter movement over the summer.
Sewell described the recent protests, saying that they were “a call for everybody’s consciousness across the globe … to force us into an accountability structure that we purport to say is actually real.”
Regarding these protests, Sims expressed disappointment toward the police’s aggressive behavior but said he was not surprised that law enforcement and other authorities did not face consequences for their actions. He noted that there were no consequences for aggressive police responses to protests in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014.
“You would have thought we were infidels,” he said. “What these deaths showed me was this nature of society to try to cover things up. Police officers … don’t value Brown and Black lives. They’re seen as disposable.”
Though President Donald Trump may not be the source of the problem, he underscored the severity and ubiquity of police brutality, Bounds said.
The conversation then turned to Sewell’s paper, “Illness Spillovers of Lethal Police Violence: The Significance of Gendered Marginalization,” which analyzes the connection between the pandemic and the revitalization of the Black Lives Matter movement, and how these impacts differentiate by gender.
“Police violence, aggressive policing, active policing, lethal or non-lethal — they have palpable effects on the communities, not just the communities that are directly receiving this violence but the people around them who witness this radioactive context of brutality,” they said.
Criminal justice policy is already geared to benefit police, Bounds noted, such that it “makes it hard if you follow the law to bring an indictment.” She emphasized how important of a role the district attorney and sheriff play in sentencing.
“They have [restorative justice policies] implemented in some states as an alternative to incarceration, particularly around youth, and the spirit around it is that justice is around the community,” Bounds said. “A harm has been done to the community, and the work is to repair the harm. You have to preserve the community. In our world, that’s hard.”
Bounds likened restorative justice policy to the abolitionist movement because it centers around a restored and healed community as the endpoint. The current criminal justice system, by contrast, restricts conversations and progress from happening. Bounds stated the system is “adversarial by nature” and therefore “poisonous” to those who go through it.
“Are we asking the system to do something it’s not built to do? You don’t build a house on a faulty foundation,” he said.
However, Sewell and Bounds both praised younger generations for their fervor and hopeful disposition that keep the fight for criminal justice reform alive.
“I really do believe that children are the future,” Sims said. “They will make this world better than we left it for them.”
