A few years ago, my friend the brilliant and fearless Paula Rojas wrote an essay titled “Are the Cops in Our Heads and Hearts?” which was published in a book called “The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex.” The entire book is terrific but I will focus here on Paula’s essay.

In her piece, she talks about her organizing work in Latin America and tries to apply lessons for movement-building in the U.S. At one point, she writes that one of the questions that she is asked by people in Latin America is: “Why are you getting a permit from the police to protest police brutality?”

The question is profound on so many levels, no? One of the arguments that Paula advances in her essay is that: “Rather than challenging state power, the non-profit model actually encourages activists to negotiate, even collaborate with the state — as those police permits for anti-police brutality marches illustrate” (p.206).

She contends that U.S. activists and organizers have internalized dominant ideas of how to organize that are based on a capitalist model which distorts the possibilities for true social transformation. The cop in our heads is therefore internalized capitalism.

I want to adapt Paula’s argument for my own purposes here. The fact is that for many of us, the ACTUAL cops are in our heads and in our hearts. We acquiesce to state power because it is easier than constantly resisting it. I am currently immersed in a project about how to address police violence with youth of color. As such, I have been reading a lot about the history of police brutality and violence.

What is becoming clearer to me every day is the difficulty of imagining a world where our first response in an emergency is NOT to dial 911. What are the alternatives to calling the police?

This question is not a new one for me. It has been animating my thinking and my organizing for over 15 years now. When Public Enemy sang 911 is a Joke in the early 90s, they were not writing an anthem about alternatives to calling the police. Instead, they were offering a social critique suggesting that the police and emergency responders were not responsive to the needs of poor people of color in urban centers. So “911 is Joke” was actually a call for police and emergency responders to “do their jobs” and provide services to poor people. So far from saying, get the hell out of our neighborhoods, the argument was about the state’s neglect of these communities.

Several months ago, I came across a blog post that has stayed with me. The post titled Feeling for the Edge of Your Imagination: Finding Ways Not to Call the Police is a letter and call to action. Here are some of the passages from the post:

All of you, but especially those of you who, like myself and the two people mentioned above, are white and/or grew up middle class and/or didn’t grow up in NYC. I’m writing to you, also, if you’ve smiled your way out of a speeding ticket, if you’ve been most afraid of cops at mass protests, or if you generally feel safer when you see police around. If these things are true for you, it’s possible that you are more distanced from the real impact of policing on low-income communities of color. But whether people in your life experience those impacts regularly or not, whether you’ve spent a night in jail, done work to support political prisoners, or haven’t thought much about police brutality since Sean Bell… if you hold a commitment to making the world a better place, I’m writing to you, because there’s work to be done.

I, and many people I know, want to see a world without prisons, we want the whole industry of keeping people in cages (the Prison Industrial Complex) abolished, we want no more police.* We want a world where responses to harm are community-based, transformative and actually create safety. Where that safety comes from strengthening relations of community, where interpersonal violence dissolves along with the structural violence that facilitates it.

Many of us don’t believe in calling the police. Right now, right here, even before we’ve sufficiently built all the alternative structures for responding to harm. Both in an attempt to create the world we want to live in, and/but also because the impact of prisons and policing is brutal, oppressive, racist, traumatic. We see almost no good coming of it, certainly no transformation, no making things better. We don’t trust police, we don’t think of them as the “good guys,” and we don’t think calling them is going to change anything.

I have so little to add to the words above except to say ‘YES.’ This makes sense to me. This is a critique that I share. Working with young people in conflict with the law, I will tell you that the police are the gateway to the prison industrial complex for them. The concept of “no entry” has some currency right now. ‘No entry’ means seriously and dramatically decreasing the amount of contact that young people have with the police on the front end. One of the ways that my organization is trying make ‘no entry’ a reality is by setting up shop directly in one of our local elementary schools to be a PHYSICAL buffer against the arrest of children from school. Yet this is a tiny intervention. So much more is needed. The work has to be larger and more transformational. What is needed is a complete overhaul of how our society thinks about policing?

More from the letter:

We live in a world that’s deeply damaged by policing, in which immediate and effective community-based responses don’t necessarily exist, or we don’t know how to find/create them. Our imaginations have atrophied, our resourcefulness has withered. There are moments when immediate intervention will save someone’s life, and it needs to be fast, and the readily available structure for that immediate intervention is the police.

We live in a world in which we can feel deeply powerless or afraid. It feels terrible when we, or the people we care about, get hurt or experience harm. When I think of the moments in which I could possibly imagine calling the police, I think of people I love, and of things I hope they never experience. Why do we feel afraid? Sometimes we feel afraid because we have experienced harm, because we have experienced trauma. Sometimes we also feel afraid because we have bought into aspects of racism, classism, and media-perpetuated images of danger. Sometimes it’s the complex combination of all these things—imagination, memory, and prejudice. For women, our experiences with physical safety are complex and painful—women in my life have understandably chosen and sought police intervention when it has seemed like the only available safety measure in situations of interpersonal or sexual abuse. So given these complicated realities, how can we assure that if police are called it’s an active, intentional and reluctant choice, not a knee-jerk reaction? What can we do to push ourselves further, to take another step towards a world without prisons, without police, and without the racism and brutality they reproduce?

This question “What can we do to push ourselves further, to take another step towards a world without prisons, without police, and without the racism and brutality they reproduce?” is the one that animates much of my work and life. In 2011, I am working on several projects that I hope will continue to slowly move me towards more concrete answers to this question. But I know that the cops ARE in my head. They are in my head because of the hegemonic nature of police power. The police are the ONLY solution to addressing harm, to addressing violence, to keeping us ‘safe.’ Isn’t that true? Can we imagine anything different from this?

It is so difficult to push myself to feel “for the edge of my imagination” because I am so steeped in THIS world with all of its distractions and all of its oppressive practices. The popular education police violence project that I am working on is in part intended to help all of us to “feel for the edge of our imaginations” and to practice how NOT to call the police. One component of the project will involve sending out teams of ‘investigators’ (regular citizens) to collect stories of police contacts from young people across the city. If we can document the prevalence of these contacts and can demonstrate the lasting impacts of these contacts, I believe that we can begin to have community discussions across Chicago that will encourage us to “feel for the edge” of our imaginations.

From the letter:

So whether this is all pretty new for you, or you’ve heard this one before, or you think of yourself as a prison abolitionist, I have a suggestion: I think we all need to think through not calling the cops. We need to explore our own personal thresholds, we need to create the Heimlich Maneuver posters that will inspire us to be brave, avoid knee-jerk dialing 911, and take the steps to create the alternative responses we wish were more common, more available.

Doesn’t this feel hard to do? To practice NOT calling the police? It feels like a lot of work, doesn’t it? It is so much easier to pick up the phone and dial 911. After all, it is simple to do. You can even be anonymous. Most of the time (depending on where you live) you can be assured that someone will show up to your house or place of work or wherever within a short period of time. It is predictable. It is a known quantity. We feel “safe.” How do we even begin to conceptualize alternatives to this system? The author of the letter has developed some suggested activities that are a great beginning. I encourage anyone who is interested in this issue to take a look.

I continue to wrestle with the Cops in my head as I work on my project. I look forward to sharing my progress with you over the coming months.