On crisis and community

I’ve seen more cops on my block in the past 24 hours than I have in months; a series of fights and muggings have brought them out in ever-increasing force, reminding me vividly that I have been wanting to write about violence, about crisis and trauma in communities, and all the ways we deal with those things. I’m thinking about this in the context of the US Social Forum and the Allied Media Conference on the horizon, the convergence of so many queer/POC/women-led groups doing powerful anti-violence work (lots of links embedded towards the end of this post), and also in the context of my own relationship to violence and safety as a white person, as a trans person, as a person with class privilege, as a person read as female, as a survivor.

I’ve written a dozen different versions of this post. I’ve been wrestling for weeks with words on a computer screen, trying to formulate something coherent to share here, feeling overwhelmed by the massive complexities, the layers of interconnectedness I want to describe. I’ve been writing about rape, domestic violence, poverty, NAFTA, policing, war and alienation and prisons. The small, individual violences in our daily lives, and the bigger violences of oil companies, of Israel, of racist Arizona politicians, of courts and corporations and police; the ways all of these are connected. But those things have been said, I don’t have to say them again.

The questions I have: how do we balance immediate safety with long-term survival and transformation; how do we stop violence when the roots are unimaginably deep; how do we end capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy so that we are no longer raped, robbed, exploited, murdered, abused; how do we do it when we are all survivors, and traumatized? The questions feel too personal and too structural. Too big.

One night towards the end of April, a friend and I were woken up at 3am by a struggle outside my apartment door, in the stairwell. We couldn’t tell what was happening, but it was loud and terrifying and it felt clear that we should do something, even after the people involved disappeared into an upstairs apartment and it was quiet again.

I know everyone who lives in my building (there are just five of us right now), and I know, based on past experiences, that we have each other’s backs. I got on the phone and talked to all my neighbors one by one, back and forth, making a plan. And we all got dressed and met up in the stairwell and went, together, to the upstairs apartment to make sure our neighbor was okay (and, more or less, she was).

I have felt so much gratitude since then, for my little group of neighbors who shared my inclination and willingness to act, not by calling the police, but by putting on our bathrobes in the middle of the night and knocking on our neighbor’s door together, prepared to help. It’s a small thing but it feels huge, to know my neighbors, to have people nearby to rely on.

Now that the Philly heat is pulling everyone out to their front stoops, my block is a whir of activity, people planting flowers by the sidewalk, kids playing, a constant flow of conversation between stoops. I grew up in rural-ish suburbs, and this constant, casual neighborly contact is still thrilling to me. My neighbors are mostly middle and working class black families, plus some white families and students. We have meetings, a block captain, an email list. People call my name and wave when I walk home, compliment my garden, invite me to barbecues and parties and meetings.

Last night a woman was mugged outside my house, and when she screamed half the block poured out into the street, half-dressed in t-shirts and pajama pants. I’m scared of all the violence in my neighborhood, and I don’t walk by myself at night, and I’m comforted by the fearlessness of my neighbors who run into the street in rescue mode when they hear screams. It’s not just the feeling of tangible, physical safety it creates, but the feeling of community and solidarity and protectiveness of each other, the way we say “neighbors look out for neighbors” and squeeze each other’s arms as we stand, after midnight, in the street. Some part of me, the trauma from violence experienced in isolation, feels healed by that.

But also, a trio of undercover cops who were staking out the block multiplied into a swarm, their radios and badges and flashing lights and guns taking a quick upper hand, more powerful than the mugger (a kid), who was arrested, more powerful than my neighbors in the street (who they tell to calm down). Crime has skyrocketed in the past year or two since a series of massive budget cuts to city services, and so there are more cops, more incarceration. The police were back this morning, with detectives in suits, looking for the kid’s discarded gun (found, loaded, in my neighbor’s garden).

The cops make some of my neighbors feel safer. Maybe they make the block safer, at least from muggings and break-ins. As I was writing this, a friend asked: “Who am I to say ‘don’t call the cops’ to people in my life who are daily impacted by violence and don’t have access to ideas of alternatives besides those offered by the state?” Another friend described growing up in a neighborhood dominated by interpersonal violence, where police were a yearned-for but mostly absent source of protection. Another friend, when I was telling the story of last night, asked, “What if the woman who got mugged was a sex worker?”

Whose safety comes at the expense of this increased police presence? Oscar Grant, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Aiyana Jones, Duanna Johnson…we cannot begin to name all of the losses, the sacrifices. I am terrified of the systems we are fighting, of how they dehumanize us by asking that we sacrifice others’ safety for our own. The cops on my block have good intentions, probably, or at the very least are simply doing the job that they’ve been given, in an economy that offers very few choices. What I hate is the power given to the police as a system, and to the broader system that terrorizes and incarcerates people for profit, the system that has proved, unceasingly, to be racist, brutal, entirely unconcerned with life, and designed to protect the wealth and control of the powerful.

I want too much. I want solutions that transform violence, at the roots, for everybody. I want us all to believe in transformation, not only our small, fierce transformative justice collaboratives, but my neighbors. I want there to be reason for us to believe. I want the words, the strength to begin these conversations and see them through, in all of my communities. I don’t want more cops.

I have been writing and writing about violence, trying to follow threads of yearning and fear and meaning and trauma to make some sense of them. I think about it all the time and the same questions still remain, and I have been wanting to write about it here because of how connected this all is: community, interdependence, prison abolition, interpersonal violence and systemic violence, war, globalization, militarism, capitalism; the threads are so knotted and entangled it’s impossible to pull them apart.

Here’s another story: last year, someone in a (very broad, loosely structured) organization I’m part of started receiving vicious threats from someone else in the organization. Several of us brainstormed strategies together – we discussed asking the threatening member to leave the organization, but felt that would risk making things worse without creating enough safety for the person receiving the threats. We knew that involving the police would empower that (brutally oppressive) system without even providing any tangible individual safety. The organization was so loose and decentralized that we had no way of providing the structured ongoing support that would be necessary if we attempted some kind of intervention.

Ultimately, we talked about it a lot and did little – the person who made the threats is still peripherally involved in the organization, and the person who received them is mostly not. Overall, it felt like a failure of community, a failure so broad that we never stood a chance of addressing it within our small, informal group.

It’s hard to write about this. It’s connected to everything I think about, everything I want. In impassioned political conversations, in meetings and convergences, in the thick of movements that are visioning and creating alternatives, it is not hard to see the openings, the opportunities for community-based strategies for safety. It is happening, I know, and I see and experience it. But in my loose-knit communities, organizations without built-in accountability, outside my house surrounded by cops, the challenges seem huge. I feel this constant sense of urgency, and it’s all bound up with my own fear and trauma, my experiences of violence and community, my desire for connection and change. I want more strategies, more tools. How else will we ever survive the inevitable apocalyptic Octavia Butler novel of the future? How else will we transform the massive systems that are killing more of us every day?

I’m leaving in a few days for the Allied Media Conference in Detroit, where there are critical masses of organizers planning conversations and skillshares about creating safe communities based in self-determination, liberation, and community accountability. It is happening, we are building; and knowing that and seeing it keeps me from feeling despair. Often, when I can muster it, I feel hope.

Let us keep hoping. Let us keep building. Let us take the risks that are required to transform. Let us be safe, and strong. Let us heal each other and ourselves, and let us remember that we, our communities, are the truest source of our safety.