Dear Mayor Romero and Tucson city council members,

Your Mandate

Thank you for your service during this difficult time and your attention to the issue before you which is equally important to if not more important than the threat posed to public health and community safety by the coronavirus pandemic.  The issue before you, the question before you, is a mandate from your constituents, the people of Tucson, that you consider reallocating funds intended for policing to other much needed services such as counseling, job training and career development, day care, and nutritional assistance with demonstrable benefits to community safety and wellbeing.  I want this mandate to be clear, because this is what it means when people say “defund the police.”  This mandate is deliberately posed in a provocative way and is intended, I believe, to make one consider your, my, and everyone’s role in a criminal injustice system in our country and our state that has led to an unfathomable situation in which the home of the brave and the land of the free locks up more of its citizens per capita than Russia and China combined and inflicts real harm on Arizona’s communities particularly communities of color.  Learn more here https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/AZ.html

How We Got Here

Arizonans of all stripes, creeds, and income levels enter into our destructive criminal system by interactions with police.  This is an extremely important point, because not all harmful interactions with police end in the police killing of a community member.  Many if not most of the time these interactions end with a charge for a non-violent crime and an arrest or the unnecessary stopping and the intentional or unintentional intimidation of a community member.  To understand why this kind of interaction is harmful even for violent offenders we must understand how people are treated in our system. Mariame Kaba director of Project NIA and The Prison Abolition Project said it best. “Is prison abolition a hard thing to explain to people? I get the same questions. What about bad people? What about rapists!? I don't answer those questions anymore. These are questions posed about safety but are mostly based in fear of the other. Safety for whom safety for what? ... There is rampant violence, rape, and deaths in custody [prison]." Indeed they are. These are not controversial statements.  The decarceration movement enjoys broad bipartisan support and is the continuation of the abolition movement.  It’s critical that you, our elected officials understand the history here too as policing in the United States has deep roots from our racist past that are absolutely grounded and wedded to slavery. A good discussion of this history can be found here:  The History Of Policing In America: Some of the first Southern police forces were created to control enslaved Black people." The surveillance, the deputization, essentially, of all white men to be police officers — and then to dispense corporal punishment on the scene — are all baked in from the very beginning," says Harvard historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPu6-1yy8-o 

As a business owner, educator, and former Pima County small business commissioner I became increasingly aware and outraged at the state of education in Arizona and the link between the state of education funding in Arizona and the link with our oversized prison population.  It started with the continuous requests small business owners get daily from our community members and customers the vast majority of these are from educators and parents asking for donations for their schools.  I began to ask myself why is that Arizona’s schools are in such dire need?  By now the answer should be clear - defunding the police may sound radical until you realize that we have been defunding education for decades.  As a business owner this has real life implications for the labor pool.  I found it difficult to find candidates for my company that could meet the minimum expectations for basic skills for almost any employee in any position in town such as effective verbal and written communication and a basic mastery of the Microsoft Office suite of programs.  How is it I thought that Arizona is failing so hard at this?  The answer here is also clear Arizona legislators currently value the wealth of private prison owners over the social mobility and welfare of its own citizens.  How do I defend such a raucous claim?  It’s simple - follow the money - “ABOR/Universities are funded at $724,818,900 and Arizona Community Colleges are funded at $56,156,100 a total of $780,975,000. FY19 funds the Department of Corrections almost 314 million more than higher education. It is also important to note that Maricopa Community College District and Pima Community College District have received zero funding since FY16. This FY19 budget is one that invests in incarceration over higher education.” To look at this problem in another way let’s consider the impact without higher ed Arizona spends $20,000 more per prisoner (many of them housed in privately owned and operated prisons) than they do per pupil. 

Refund The Community

I hope this affirms and confirms the mandate to you that defunding the police is absolutely necessary and is beneficial to community safety and public health.  This should be obvious to anyone but police more often than not respond to crimes that have already been committed so until and unless police are able to foresee crimes and stop them before they happen their benefit outside of some very rare events such as active shooter situations where the intervention of highly training armed forces into the community is questionable at best.  Imagine the opportunity cost of keeping the police helicopter up the air all night long.  Imagine what those funds could do for the mental and physical health of the working poor in our community in the form of counselors and health clinics. Development of better, more equitable and sustainable public transportation to connect jobs to neighborhoods all over the city. Day care and classes for parents and children to help our opportunity youth and community build a better future for us all. Help educate our cities youth with real life skills needed for the high paying jobs that don’t require an expensive high ed degree by funding Pima JTED. Do any or all of these things and remember it is your personal responsibility as elected officials to make this community better than the one that voted for you. For guidance and to hear voices from Tucson’s black and brown voices I suggest you listen to the responses posed to community members by the American Friends Service Committee and Flower & Bullets a project known as the Barrio Centro community safety research project.  AFSC X Flowers & Bullets #Repost @afscaz ・・・ “What Instead of the Police/Punishment System?” At the end of our #BarrioCentro Community Safety Research Project survey, respondents were given the opportunity to name specifically what they would like to see funded in their neighborhood. People named murals, ramadas, shade trees, community gardens, sidewalks, little library boxes, on-going neighborhood events, bike-rental stations, parks and green spaces, covered bus shelters, free legal advice, free counseling services, housing for the homeless with a path to ownership, splash parks with restrooms, and sports fields. Not one respondent named funding for police. #FlowersandBullets = #CommunitySafety. #ReFramingJustice #BlackLivesMatter #BLMTucson #DefundPolice #DefundLawEnforcement #FundBlackFutures #CommunityCareworkers #ReBuildCommunities #ReImagineSafety #NanaAyudame

In community,

Michael Mallozzi, PhD                                                      Co-founder                                                                        Borderlands Brewing Company                                      Tucson, AZ

PS a brilliant and thoughtful analysis from New York City (below)

Defund the Police (A rap by Nate and Hila https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aldIVJ5sXh4)
There's been a lot of discussion lately of what this phrase #DefundThePolice really means. We've been contemplating it and researching it, and subsequently, rhyming about it. Defund does not mean eradicate utterly; but it does mean radically reduce police funding, and restructure the institution. DeBlasio has promised to knock $1 billion from the NYPD budget -- but there's more to be done. Here are some of our thoughts, in rhyme.

Here's an article with an array of organizations you can support that are pushing for police defunding and reform: https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2020/06/9856512/how-to-help-defund-the-police

An here are some of the sources we consulted in putting this together, so you can investigate for yourself:
https://council.nyc.gov/budget/fy18-22_financial_plan_overview/
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@mpd_150
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https://www.changethenypd.org/
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/08/us/what-does-defund-police-mean.html