BLM Atlanta Co-Founder on Police Abolition
The uprising against police brutality had been raging in Atlanta for weeks when police officers killed 27-year-old Rayshard Brooks, after he was found sleeping in his car in a restaurant drive-thru lane.
The Atlanta City Council passed a resolution demanding that the mayor draft a police reform plan, but the resolution was nonbinding. The city also failed to pass an ordinance that would have withheld $73 million from the city’s police budget until the mayor’s administration drafted the plan. Atlanta’s police chief also resigned following Brooks’ death, and local Black activists have renewed their call to defund the Atlanta Police Department and invest in community resources and programs that help prevent harm.
AJ+ senior producer Mara Van Ells spoke with Mary Hooks, co-director of Southerners on New Ground, a justice and advocacy group for LGBTQ people in the South, and a leader with the Movement for Black Lives, to learn more about how people in Atlanta are pushing for change. Here are some takeaways:
“A transition toward more self-governed communities”
Protesters are demanding that the city of Atlanta reallocate 50% of the police budget, and Hooks believes that the money should be moved to a budget line for community control, which involves scaling up impactful community-based resources — organizations with people who are part of the community and have the cultural competency to de-escalate situations. She knows it won’t be easy.
“It took this country decades to build out the prison industrial complex,” says Hooks. “What we should be preparing ourselves for is a just transition toward more self-governed communities, a way in which we engage in and address harm that doesn't rely on punishment. Accountability, yes. Punishment, no. Two different things.”
"An institution as rotten to the core cannot be transformed or reformed."
— AJ+ (@ajplus) June 27, 2020
This activist is pushing to defund the police in Atlanta. pic.twitter.com/vYYTijshCF
Stop thinking about small solutions
Hooks decries “weak-sauce legislation” from both Democrats and Republicans that doesn’t actually redistribute political power. She saw what happened when people called for body cameras, she says – an approach that gave more resources to the department and failed to stop brutality. Anyone who wants to approach the problem with such fixes, says Hooks, “is giving our people crumbs.”
Activists paved the way for Atlanta’s jail to become a community wellness center
In the past five years, Black trans women led the declassification of marijuana as an arrestable offense under an ounce, while Southerners on New Ground activists helped end pretrial detention and bail reform – all with the aim of emptying Atlanta’s jail. Last year, Atlanta’s mayor signed legislation authorizing the closure of the jail, which Hooks and Southerners on New Ground wanted to transform into a wellness center for community care. “For the last year, there has been ongoing conversations, community meetings to design what that place could look like,” Hooks said. But a timeline for the jail’s closure has yet to be decided, and last month the mayor allocated $18 million more to the jail’s 2021 budget.
“We need to lean in more toward survivors”
Hooks wants the officers who killed Rayshard Brooks to be held accountable. She also wants “to make sure [Brook’s] family is given the mental health support that they need, that his children never go lacking. And that that officer never serves in this role again,” she says. Reparations should be determined by those harmed. “We need to lean in more toward the survivors of harm like this, to say, ‘What did they need? How do we make sure that their lives are sustained?’”
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