Cop Cities, Democracy, and Reimaging Community Safety With Renee Johnston

Renee Johnston has been an educator and union member for over 2 decades. She currently serves as a committee chair of the Global Pan-African Movement, North America and the Green Party of New Jersey, for which she is a registered member; Renee can be found on Black Power Media on the I Mix What I Like show, "Saturdays with Renee". She is also a new member of Black Alliance for Peace, a rabbit hole researcher, political education event organizer and budding writer.

 

The concept of cop city has been thrust into the national discussion in the last year, as private, public, and non profit forces have lined up to build a massive police training facility in Atlanta. The community opposition to this project and the lengths elected Democrats and Republicans will go in order to repress and crush the movement against this has once again shown the way both parties are invested in policing as their main mechanism to envision public safety and to protect property.

 

On this Show Renee and I discuss proposed police training facilities all over the country and explore the ways that these become yet another way to increase funding and built infrastructure designed to secure policing. We also talk about the ways that communities are resisting these facilities and ways that we can begin to reimagine safety, by redistributing political power and economic resources to the communities that are most heavily policed today.

--Resources--

Public Square Amplified Article-Prisons, policing, and cop cities: They cannot exist in a democratic society https://www.publicsq.org/democracy-politics/prisons-policing-and-cop-cities

Renee’s Research, Map, and Spreadsheet of Cop Cities Around The Country https://isyourlifebetter.net/cop-cities-usa/

National Lawyers Guild Webinar Stop All Cop Cities: Lessons For a National Struggle https://vimeo.com/914852334

Funding Report on Baltimore Public Safety Training Facility https://mdstad.com/sites/default/files/Appendix%20H%20-%20Funding%20Sources.pdf

Black Power Media https://www.blackpowermedia.org/

Saturday’s With Renee https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOgJ9yBwVs4