00:00 People have a lot of opinions about policing, and our ideas about policing are shaped by our race,
00:07 our genders, our class, and our parents. For example, most white people have very little
00:14 interaction with police. In a recent study, 77% of white people had no contact with police
00:21 in the previous year. Of those who did, at least half were traffic stops, and in many cases,
00:28 white people initiated contact by calling the police. Since they have little unwanted contact,
00:34 many white people's opinions about policing are not based on personal experience. Dominant culture,
00:42 especially mass media, sells us the image of "officer-friendly," but whose experience is that
00:49 actually based on? The same study found that black people experience excessive force at the hands of
00:57 police at more than twice the rate of white people. Did we have a just and equitable police force,
01:05 and something went wrong? No. Policing in the South emerged from the slave patrols in the 17
01:12 and 1800s that caught and returned runaway enslaved people. In the West, police departments
01:20 were formed to keep Native people out of cities built by white settlers. And in the North, the
01:27 first municipal police departments in the mid-1800s helped quash labor strikes and riots against the
01:34 rich and policed public spaces to conform to middle-class white morality around gender and
01:41 sexuality and exclude poor, unhoused, or disabled people. Policing in the U.S. began as a system of
01:49 economic, social, racial, patriarchal, and ableist control. And that is what it still is today.
01:57 The truth is police don't do what most people think they do. Police spend more than half of
02:03 their time responding to non-criminal calls and traffic issues, and only 1-3% of their time
02:10 responding to violent crime calls. Police don't stop violence. They respond to violence that has
02:16 already occurred, and they respond with their own threat of violence. And that response is not
02:22 equitable. When people of color are involved, police often engage violently. Yet we spend an
02:31 astronomical amount of money on the police. Over $100 billion a year. Let that sink in.
02:40 The demand to defund the police is about minimizing the role and power of police in
02:46 our society. It's about demanding that the government stop writing blank checks for
02:52 racist control, containment, and punishment. Defunding the police is also about recognizing
02:58 that police do not solve or address any social issues. They do not prevent harm.
03:05 What if we took that $100 billion and invested it in our community?
03:11 What if we had housing, access to healthy food and clean water, healthcare, healing,
03:19 cooperative businesses, education, child care, parks, art, and community services?
03:25 If you already have those things, great. But that's not the reality everywhere.
03:32 Ask yourself, if we have the resources, why doesn't everyone have this?
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