I had to understand the history of police inadequacy to these harms and then learn that, well, the police weren't created to respond to these harms in - Derecka Purnell

why do we have to run from cops in our neighborhood and then go to school and run from, quote, "school resource officers," unquote, in order to learn, in order to get an education?...I watched that from sixth grade all the way until I graduated high school.

I hope that more people are being called to be molders of that society, molders of that consensus, instead of just reflecting the current consensus that we have - because that's where all the oppression lives.

One reason why I love defund the police is because it's a policy demand. It's actually a policy demand. One critique of Black Lives Matter from people who are sympathetic to its cause is that it didn't mean anything. Where is the policy? Where is the plan? What are you really asking for? Black Lives Matter is just a slogan. And so then, you know, six years later, in 2020, instead of saying Black Lives Matter, people started saying take away resources from the police as a very specific policy demand, well, now that's much harder to co-opt. We're hearing people say, well, this is the policy that we want. We want you to take away resources from the police, and we want you to invest it in all of the other resources that make us safe. We want better schools. We want better housing. We want health care. We want quality jobs. We want to be able to work with dignity. We want child care. We want our student debt canceled. So we want to remove resources from the carceral state and pour into all of these other avenues that make us live healthy lives full of dignity and joy.