Bummer Book Club
Continuing our Reading of Policing the Planet The lives of those with Black and Brown bodies are threatened long before situations escalate to murder at the hands of police.
“Hyper-aggressive enforcement of minor nonviolent infractions that targets communities of color doesn’t make any of our communities safer” (page 64)
Since 2010 we have seen “an explosive rise in incarceration, a generation growing up with criminal records, the dismantling of communities, the shattering of trust in the police, and a police force trained to focus on the quantity and not the quality of arrests” (page 79).
Lives of those in lower income communities, particularly for young Black men, are negatively affected by police, even without direct contact. Money and resources that should be spent on bettering community services and resources instead are used to increase policing and degrade the idea of a community.
Those who survive police custody are not spared, but rather forced into a system of mass incarceration that robs them of their lives in a different way. Those arrested as teens are denied their childhood often for no valid reason at all. There is no hope in bettering our society until we stop treating children as adults in the name of the law, end sentencing for low level offenses (or the mere perception of one) and focus on education. After surviving the prison system, into adulthood, these individuals are forced to navigate a society that does not treat those with criminal records kindly -- in some cases denying such basic rights as voting, regardless of the charge.