I was first introduced to the concept of a North Star as a rhetorical tool for directing advocacy resources and organizing efforts by PolicyLink director Angela Glover Blackwell in 2018. A ‘North Star,’ as Blackwell describes it, refers to your end game, the utopia you dream of. It is a vision of the future that may seem out of reach right now, but could become reality with the right coordination of people power, advocacy efforts, equitable resource allocation, and political courage.
A North Star guides our day-to-day actions, even when progress is slow, or when barriers arise and cause us to change course. Here at ERG, our North Stars are undeniably ambitious, but we pursue them because we believe them to be possible: ensuring safe and reliable energy resources for communities lacking electricity, restoring or preserving ecological biodiversity, ensuring access to clean water for our generation and those that follow, phasing out fossil fuels, facilitating global abundance without destroying our environment, and more. When we meet a crossroads in our efforts toward realizing these visions, keeping in mind our North Star helps us choose the path that takes us closer, over the ones that take us sideways and back.
In the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis police officers in June — an event which drove millions of people to protest in the midst of a pandemic and demand justice for all Black people who have been victimized by police violence — a subset of the members of ERG’s Student Advocacy Committee for Equity & Inclusion (SACEI) joined together to answer the questions: What can we do? What is our role as an organization of students devoted to equity, as members of the ERG community, as members of the broader UC Berkeley community, and as human beings appalled by the bold face of state-sanctioned racism that George Floyd’s murder exposed for the nth time?
Over the course of weekly meetings throughout the summer (join SACEI!) we worked collaboratively to define our North Star, and the actions we might take to get there. Our North Star, as I understand it, conjures an image of campus in which the needs of students, staff, faculty, and the broader community are fully met by wraparound services that provide access to safe shelter, food, mental health services, medical services, and formal and informal networks of mutual aid. We look out for others in our community and check in on each other often. Safety is defined by a supportive network and secure safety net, not the presence of armed police. We mediate conflicts by seeking remedies for those who were wronged, rather than isolating and alienating the wrongdoer. Poverty isn’t criminalized. Black people’s safety isn’t jeopardized for white people’s comfort.
In accordance with this North Star, members of SACEI joined the voices of our colleagues across campus in calling on Chancellor Christ, President Michael Drake, and other UC administrators to completely defund UCPD and reinvest the roughly $22M in programs that materially improve the health and wellness of Berkeley students, like mental health services, additional housing, and food pantries.
Calling on campus administration to defund UCPD is a direct movement toward our North Star. Removing the inherently racist institution of police from campus is a necessary first step to establishing a clean slate from which to redefine how we think about safety. Reforming police necessitates additional investment in policing — a clear departure from the vision outlined above. While the authors of the letter acknowledge the considerable work that it will take to remove UCPD from campus, we ask campus administrators to suspend their disbelief and their cynicism, and take steps in the direction of our North Star. Imagine a campus that doesn’t need police to feel safe, and direct resources accordingly.
SACEI’s letter to campus administrators is replicated below, and was drafted through a collaborative process by a subset of SACEI members. The list of demands is largely derived from those we read in other letters being published by our colleagues across campus at the time, including graduate students in the Public Policy, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (ESPM), Plant & Microbial Biology, Integrative Biology, and Chemistry departments, to name just a few. The letter was signed by over 50 members of the broader ERG community, including alumni.
Thank you to the abolitionist activists and organizers who are helping us envision a better world for ourselves, and continue to lead the charge in building it.
| Dear President Michael V. Drake, Chancellor Christ, Dean Ackerly, Academic Senate Chair O’Reilly, and UC Regents, We are outraged and grieved by the lives lost to police violence and racism—Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Rayshard Brooks, and countless others—and are calling upon our University leadership to take immediate, swift, and sustained action to dismantle systems of anti-Black racism in our community. We appreciate the Chancellor’s letter (“Reimagining Public Safety”) sent to the UC Berkeley community on June 18th, 2020. We agree with the Chancellor that “the time has passed for incrementalism.” Active anti-racism as pledged, however, will remain hollow until words are accompanied by bold and concrete action. We support our Black colleagues and community members, and stand in solidarity with graduate student bodies across campus who have demanded actions from their respective departments to deliver on statements of anti-racism (e.g. ESPM, Integrative Biology, Plant & Microbial Biology, Chemistry, Public Policy, and others). We demand that UC Berkeley (UCB) plays an active and public role in efforts to disarm and defund UCPD, cut ties with local police departments, and reinvest in community alternatives to policing, as detailed below. The Energy and Resources Group’s (ERG) mission is to provide education and research for a sustainable environment and a just society. That mission remains unfulfilled, and will remain so, until our department, our university, our community and society, cease to participate in systems that inflict and perpetuate anti-Black violence and racism. To meet goals 2B and 3A of the 2019–2024 ERG Strategic Plan for Equity, Inclusion, and Diversity, ERG must recruit and support Black students. Given the history of anti-Black violence perpetrated by UCPD and BPD, ERG cannot fully meet this goal so long as UC Berkeley supports UCPD and affiliates with BPD. To achieve ERG’s EID goals and work toward ERG’s mission of a just society, ERG must necessarily play an active role in defunding and abolishing the police. The path to justice is clear, as has been stated over and over by the communities most lacking justice: the police have no place in our community and must be defunded and abolished. It is our mission to realize that just society. Historical Context of Violence Racist violence and intimidation perpetrated by UCPD and Berkeley PD continues to traumatize our campus and surrounding community (as detailed in letters from LSAD, UAW, GSPP, and others). UCPD has been an active participant in police militarization, acquiring over a dozen military-grade assault rifles in 2006 through the military surplus program 1033, which enables law enforcement agencies to requisition excess property from the U.S. Department of Defense. In November 2011, UCPD pepper-sprayed students protesting at UC Davis in response to tuition increases and in alignment with the Occupy movement, and subsequently paid external consultants to eliminate online postings about the incident. In February 2013, Berkeley PD suffocated Kayla Moore, a Black trans woman, in her home, in response to a mental health call. In 2018, a Black UC Berkeley employee and AFSCME 3299 member, David Cole, was brutally arrested while exercising his right to strike at a union demonstration. He was thrown to the ground and handcuffed whilst police officers pressed themselves onto his body. A 2018 report by the Center for Policing Equity found that Black persons in Berkeley were stopped and searched at much higher rates per capita than white persons. Black persons who were searched, however, were less likely to be found committing a criminal offense than their white counterparts. In March 2019, two Black UC Berkeley students and a Black University of San Francisco student were searched on their way home without just cause. Two of them were charged for resisting arrest and brought into interrogation without having been read their rights. In June 2019, two Black minors, sons of UC Berkeley students, were detained with excessive force. One of them, an 11-year-old child, was handcuffed and both children were detained at a playground on University property and placed in the back of a patrol car. In February 2020, UC Irvine police arrested a Black alumna Shikera Chamndany who was attempting to get her transcripts, passing by a Cost-Of-Living Adjustment (COLA) protest, without participating in it. At the COLA strike in UC Santa Cruz, UCPD collaborated with the California National Guard to monitor and control students and workers demanding better living conditions, deploying military surveillance equipment to do so. In March 2020, a Black man was shot while on his knees with a “less-lethal round” by Berkeley PD. The Berkeley Jail and Public Defender could not afterwards confirm the shooting despite it being caught on camera. In the wake of George Floyd’s death in police custody, Berkeley PD and UCPD police officers have been patrolling Black Lives Matter protests in neighboring precincts, including Oakland and San Francisco, under California’s mutual aid program. These documented incidents constitute a small sample of a broader pattern of racial profiling and police brutality at the hands of UCPD and Berkeley PD. Solutions for Change: Disarming & Defunding In the past, UCB has claimed that UCPD is crucial to protecting the campus community. Defunding the police does not mean sacrificing safety. Defunding the police means reinvesting resources in prevention and restorative justice such that police use of force is never required. For decades, the dominant paradigm has been that we need more police on our streets and campuses to reduce crime. Yet, the benefits of increasing police funding have been marginal, while leading to increased brutality and mass incarceration. Oakland Police Department’s budget, for instance, has increased 78% since 2002, while crime has decreased by a mere 3%. Furthermore, police departments often focus increased resources on business districts and tourism destinations, not crime hotspots in outlying neighborhoods. There are numerous methods of ensuring community safety that do not endanger Black lives. Investing in community organizations reduces crime, and prioritizing mental health experts as first responders can significantly reduce violent encounters with police without sacrificing safety. Other proven methods for reducing crime include raising the minimum wage, and increased spending on drug treatment, education, and affordable housing. Defunding and disarming UCPD means redirecting the roughly $22M dedicated to UC Berkeley’s police budget toward efforts that are proven to improve the safety and wellbeing of our communities, as described above. Defunding and disarming UCPD represent critical first steps toward radical reimagination of what it means to create a safe and just campus. Crucially, the success of these reinvestment efforts necessitates dramatic reductions in police department budgets and purviews. Chancellor Christ herself has stated “the time has passed for incrementalism” and we adamantly agree. Police reform—like banning carotid holds, as recently announced—is incremental change and will not end racist police violence. It is furthermore insufficient to direct funding to mental health services, community organizations, and institutions of restorative justice, without also divesting from the racist institutions that endanger Black people in our community. UC Berkeley’s police budget in 2016 was about $22M, not including the roughly $4M spent protecting far-right speakers during a one-month period of 2017. In contrast, the entire UC system budgeted about $40M for mental health services in 2016. In other words, in 2016, the cost of policing on the Berkeley campus alone was equivalent to the amount invested in mental health services across 50% of the entire UC system, or approximately five campuses. This budget is an embarrassing demonstration of UCB’s values and demonstrates the sheer scale of divestment necessary for any serious reimagination of public safety. Additional resources that outline the demands and vision of the broader #DefundPolice movement can be found at Critical Resistance and from M4BL. Our Demands for Action by UC Berkeley Leadership UC Berkeley has a tradition of leading on progressive political movements in the U.S., and this instance must be no exception. We are encouraged by Chancellor Christ’s message on June 18 calling for changes in police spending and responsibilities at UCB, but the urgency of this crisis demands more than small, incremental action. To ensure the safety of Black students and students of color at UCB and in our community, we must act swiftly to institute comprehensive change. While there is long-term work to be done at UCB to combat racial injustice, there are immediate actions we as a University can and should take. We demand that: – UCB must fully defund the UC Police Department over the next year. The Chancellor’s pledge to reassign some police activities to other departments is incremental and will not solve the systemic and dire nature of these problems. The Chancellor herself has stated “the time has passed for incrementalism” in reimagining public safety. Without a commitment to full defunding, Black students will continue to face violence and abuse at the hands of police on our campus. – UCB must commit resources to support community-led alternatives to policing and develop plans to ensure the safety of Black students on campus. Money previously used to fund UCPD should be redirected to community investments such as mental health services for students, financial support for Black students at Cal, as well as to campus entities such as the Basic Needs Fund, the Othering & Belonging Institute, Restorative Justice Center, Counseling and Psychological Services, and the African American Initiative. The process of defunding the police and the defining, designing, and implementing community safety and health programs must be guided by students of color and existing community organizations. UCB must commit to this consultation and collaborative process immediately. – UCB must sever all ties with all local Police Departments, following the precedent of the University of Minnesota, which terminated most of its contracts with the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD), and Minneapolis Public Schools, which ended all ties with the MPD. UCPD’s contractual relationship with BPD dates back to 1958, and continues to grant BPD policing, administrative, and jurisdictional authority over members of the Cal community. The current operational agreement (in conjunction with the 2015 addendum to the operational agreement) currently stipulates joint jurisdiction, shared responsibilities, and joint policing between UCPD and BPD. This operational agreement must be terminated in full. – Chancellor Christ must present to the UCB community a timeline for which the above demands as well as the promises and actions outlined in her June 18th letter “Reimagining Public Safety” will be completed. It is time for bold action that innovates and reimagines alternative systems of community safety at UC Berkeley. Those are the words of the Chancellor herself. As members of the UCB community, we must actively support Black students and the broader Black community to ensure that these statements are not empty. These statements must become reality. SIGNED, Reem Rayef Salma Elmallah Karina French Adam Orford Cristina Crespo Montañés Will Gorman Gordon Bauer Oliver James Ella Belfer Seigi Karasaki Michelle Sims Jenny Rempel Esther Shears Anaya Hall Julia Longmate David Tozer Marshall Worsham Sophie Major Nabig Chaudhry Jonathan Lee Niklas Lollo Rachel Ward Kelsey Alford-Jones Samira Siddique Yoshika Crider Rosa Letizia Beschi Nancy Freitas Julia Szinai Christopher Hyun Arthur Mallet Dias Elias Lazarus Sangcheol Moon Phillippe Phanivong Jesse Strecker Micah Elias Anna Yip Jess Goddard Nicholas Depsky Gauthami Penakalapati Hilary Henry Hikari Murayama Taryn Fransen Edem Yevoo Ian Bolliger Catherine Ledna Sean Kelly Joyceline Marealle Sasha Ponomareva Jessica Katz Ariel Chu Molly Oshun Rashmi Sahai Emma Tome Emily Yeh Harvey Bryan Tarik Tuten Eli Yewdall Ronnie D. Lipschutz Helen Chen Pierce Gordon Nancy Rader Zack Norwood Francisco Dóñez Maria Stamas Deborah Wilson Cornland Sam Arons, MS’07, ERGAN President 2014-2018 Cecilia Springer Peter Worley |
Banner image by Chad Davis