Standing on a slab of concrete this past May in a backyard shared by two Japanese boarding houses, I found myself in the midst of a construction site. Discarded piles of wood were strewn about. Plastic sheeting taped to the sides of one of the buildings blew gently in the evening wind. The rear walls of one of the boarding houses had been demolished, leaving a gutted husk of what used to be a room and a bathroom. The whole property had recently been purchased by a landlord who is renovating both boarding houses after buying out most of the long-time Japanese American tenants who had lived there for decades.
Other local organizers and I had gathered there amongst the ruins of these historic buildings, buildings where seven Japanese American men (six elderly and one middle aged) still live, to come together in community. For over a year now, neighbors and organizers have been fighting alongside these men for their right to remain in their boarding house apartments. Some of the men have lived in these apartments for thirty to forty years. Some of them don’t speak much English, but survive in community with their fellow Japanese Americans, a demographic that was once much more predominant in this area of East Hollywood.
On this particular evening, we were there to eat. People from the local organization J-Town Action and Solidarity (JAS) brought food and drinks to share with the men and with other organizers and community members who wanted to join in this community meal. Everyone contributed something: food, drinks, tables, trash bags. The men contributed the seating. One by one, they each dragged a chair out of their boarding house into the backyard and placed the mismatched chairs around the three folding tables JAS had assembled.
After the meal, we did a round of introductions with translation assistance by a member of JAS. Many people already knew one another, but we did the introductions anyway. We called our own names into the evening sky and smiled at the sound of each others’ voices. We came together to eat, but really we came together to say to these men: we know you are here, we are glad you are here, you are not alone, you will not fight this battle alone, and the battle will not only be one of struggle, but also a bringing together of people in communion. The energy that night was warm and connected, an energy rooted in an act of hope. Not hope in the tired, ambiguous, clichéd sense of the word which is usually correlated with a feeling or with Barack Obama’s 2008 election campaign, but hope as a practice, a belief system, a discipline.
Writer, educator, and organizer Mariame Kaba talks about hope as a discipline in an episode of the podcast Beyond Prisons, where she says: “That speaks to me as a philosophy of living, that hope is a discipline and that we have to practice it every single day. Because in the world which we live in, it’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness, that everything is all bad all the time, that there is nothing going to change ever, that people are evil and bad at the bottom…I choose to think a different way and I choose to act in a different way.”
Kaba is an abolitionist, and so her perspective on the discipline of hope informs and is informed by her work around prisons and policing. I am both a community organizer and also a faculty member at a local university, and for many years now, the focus of my research and of my community organizing has also been policing. As such, I have taken Kaba’s adage to heart. I try to focus on what is good, on what is working, on what we want to build. Sometimes in this work it can feel as if the world we want to build, a world without prisons and police, a world where we have alternatives to these violent and punishing systems, feels far off, elsewhere, intangible.
But standing in front of these elders, my neighbors and community members, and joining with them and others amidst construction rubble, food, and hope, I was reminded that the world I and others are trying to build already exists. The safety we are looking for is a safety we will not only create in or for the future, but is a safety we have begun to create, that communities before us knew how to create. A safety that does not rely on landlords or governmental bureaucracy or policing or surveillance, but on us, on our shared existence in this city, on connection to one another.
At the university where I work, I study how policing manifests in things like surveillance, campus cops, and the disciplining of our students, but when I talk about policing to others less familiar with these ideas, I usually start by talking about safety. Often in this work, I hear people unfamiliar with the history of policing conflate safety (which abolitionists see as a relational concept in which people rely on each other for safety) with security (which is more focused on protecting people from each other and which positions people as being in opposition to one another).
As an organizer and as a teacher, I work with others in my neighborhood and at my workplace to interrogate the connection between policing and safety. When I am with my students, I ask them, “when are some times that you have felt safe in your life?” And they tell me about being with their family and friends, about spaces of trust, about community, about situations similar to that community dinner at the Japanese boarding houses. Almost never do they mention police when I initiate the conversation by asking about safety. When I ask them about times they’ve felt unsafe, however, many of them reference the police. They tell me about border patrol and about their assumed criminality because of the language they speak or because of the color of their skin. “Sometimes if the police are around, I just feel like I’ve done something wrong, even if I haven’t, and then I get nervous,” one of them says.
The goal of my conversations about policing is first to help students and community members connect to a felt sense of safety and to help them understand what, exactly, keeps us all safe. Together, we make a list of resources we and others might need in order to feel safe, healthy, and supported from the moment we are born until the moment we die. That list includes things like money, since in this country and many others, money buys the food and shelter and other material goods required for survival. Our list also includes things like health care, mental health services, supportive and accessible addiction treatment facilities. It includes things like public infrastructure that is well-maintained and that facilitates community building and connection. Clean parks with plenty of shade, lighting, and seating. Public restrooms and trash cans. Access to free or inexpensive meals.
As an example of already-existing access to free food, I tell them about the community fridge around the corner from me in Virgil Village. It is one of three community fridges in East Hollywood, and it is one of many, many more fridges in the larger network of LA Community Fridges (inspired by the community fridges in New York City, which now appear in many other cities as well). These fridges are independently operated by community members. An individual person or a team of people will seek out a host for the fridge, and once the host agrees to allow the fridge on their property, a fridge (usually one that is donated by someone else) is installed on site. It is cleaned, painted, and stocked with food.
Anyone can donate food to the community fridge (though for the sake of food safety, they require all meals to be prepared in a commercial kitchen, so nothing home cooked). Anyone can clean and maintain the fridge. Anyone can take food from the fridge any time. The fridge crews do not police the fridges. They do not tell people how much they can take or how often. They trust that if someone is taking food from the fridge, it is because they need it for themselves or for their loved ones. They talk to local businesses to arrange donations of their excess food. They send people to pick up that food and deliver it to a fridge. This cuts down on food waste. This also means that people who might otherwise have to steal food or go hungry have a safer option. The fridge system is not perfect, but it provides people not only with basic necessities like food, but also with opportunities for connection and community building.
When I talk to students and community members about safety, I am never the first one to mention the police. Because to get people to understand the function of policing, you first have to help them realize that their safety is already dependent on something other than the police. And you have to help them understand the difference between feeling unsafe and actually being un-safe. You have to encourage people to think about how and why “crime” happens to begin with. To grasp the problem at its root.
In my conversations, once we establish what safety means, what safety looks like, then we can transition to conversations about policing where we can interrogate the myths of policing and the propaganda we receive at a young age through TV, movies, and programs like D.A.R.E. I do a little history lesson on U.S. policing. I talk about its roots in slave patrols. I talk about its roots in labor control. I talk about policing as a means of protecting property and the interests of the ruling class. I talk about how policing actually creates “crime” and about the slippery grasp we all have on what constitutes a “crime” to begin with.
“Laws are arbitrary and always changing,” I tell them, “so one day something might not be considered a crime, and then the next day someone rules it is.” I talk about how some crime is actually “legal” insofar as someone can afford to pay whatever fine accompanies the crime. About how things like public urination could lead to criminal charges for indecent exposure or being a public nuisance, and how no such “crime” would happen if there were clean restrooms publicly available at all times. How “crimes” associated with something like public urination usually just involve a fine, not jail time, and how someone wealthy can just pay that fine and move on, while someone poor might end up incarcerated because they cannot and therefore do not pay that fine.
I tell them that on my block, in addition to the community fridges, but in a neighborhood that still severely lacks resources like public restrooms or trash cans, many of us build relationships with our unhoused neighbors. Those neighbors are often antagonized by the city and forced into situations in which they are then criminalized. For years now, my block has been home to a few different encampments of unhoused people. For the most part, the housed neighbors on my block treat their unhoused neighbors like they would anyone else, which is to say they wave hello and otherwise mind their own business. They do not call the cops. They do not call the city to have the unhoused people “removed,” because many of the people in my neighborhood have, themselves, experienced violence at the hands of the state, or have at least come to understand that the state likely will not solve houselessness. Some of us bring food to our unhoused neighbors when we have leftovers or some spare money to buy extra on our grocery runs.
I tell them that my unhoused neighbors make me feel like I live in the safest neighborhood in the city. That they are almost always near their tents and so I know that if I walk home late, they’ll be right there in case something were to happen. But while it is easy for my unhoused neighbors to keep others safe, the city makes it incredibly hard for housed neighbors to keep unhoused people safe. Groups like StreetWatch LA will stand witness by recording video on their phones when the city sends sanitation workers and police to remove the belongings of our unhoused neighbors. I tell them that I have never once seen the city, in those situations, provide those unhoused neighbors with housing alternatives.
Organizers and unhoused people refer to the city’s removal of encampments as “sweeps.” When the sweep is done, community organizations will often use community resources (mutual aid funds, supplies from local orgs) to replace the tents, sleeping bags, etc that the city threw away. What we can’t easily replace are ID cards, sentimental objects, or medications. On Saturdays, people from SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition stop by the encampment on my block to deliver water and to ask if anyone needs a ride to the local church where SELAH has showers, meals, clothes, and other supportive services. All of this work—the filming of sweeps, the distribution of necessary materials for survival, the replacement of those materials after a sweep—is done by community members, not by the city of LA or the state of California. Community organizations are constantly trying to patch up the wounds the city inflicts, but without the same access to resources and infrastructure that the state has access to, it’s hard to keep up.
The number one thing people ask me after we’ve had these conversations about safety and policing is: “Now what? What do we do with this information?” they want to know. “How do we build this imaginary world you’re talking about?” They name all the obstacles and barriers, of which there are indeed many. I do not downplay the challenges or the realities of the world we live in. I couldn’t downplay them if I tried. The terrors of policing are in our faces constantly, whether we acknowledge them or not. The fight is an old one, an on-going one, a fight into and for the present and the future. I try to remind myself of all the infrastructure we have already built to support one another, which seems like a blueprint for how to do this work on a larger scale, in perpetuity. I also lean on this thing urban theorist and political activist Mike Davis said on an episode of the podcast TrueAnon, in which he actually seems to disregard hope in favor of perseverance even in the face of hopelessness:
I don’t believe that personal morality and character should be grounded on hope…
We need people who are grounded in the belief that there is a single humanity, and that battles are fought whether or not you can calculate that they’ll be successes. The struggle must be our very existence and we must never accept the limitations of the political realistic; we must act on what is necessary in the most basic sense for the survival of ordinary people.
It doesn’t look like we’re gonna survive it, but we still fight like hell. In fact, we become better fighters, knowing that it’s the fight itself, is the most important thing. Maybe these are strange or antiquated values. I still believe in character. That people produce themselves through the moral choices and actions that they take, irregardless of calculations of success or wealth or anything like that. Actions that are rooted in solidarity and love for other people and the common condition.
The neighborhood I live in is not perfect. Someone on my street once started a fire because he was angry at someone else. Someone else called the fire department. A fight broke out between a few of the men who were present. It escalated. I stood between the man who started the fire and the teenage boy he was trying to fight and delivered a back the F*** up in the harshest, most angry momma voice I could muster. It took a couple other neighbors to help me de-escalate. The whole hood was standing outside on the street that night. It was chaos. But at no point did I feel unsafe. These are my people, I thought. We are in conflict. One of us is doing harm. The rest of us are trying to mitigate that harm. The police were not necessary. We take care of each other. We are what safety looks like, what safety feels like. We are imperfect and we are learning and we are sometimes failing, but we are still trying, every day, to build the world we want to live in.
Part of building the world you want to live in means striving to live in accordance with the values you espouse. But I want to make it clear that I am under no delusions when it comes to the power and violence of the state, despite whatever values one may hold. I tell you these anecdotes about my neighborhood because hope is a discipline, and because I and many of my fellow organizers wouldn’t have the energy to work in community the way we do if we did not truly have hope that we can make a better, safer, more just world, even if that is not a world we live to see.
We do not build mutual aid networks, food justice initiatives, or community alternatives to policing in order to let the state off the hook. We build them because the state won’t build them. At least not often enough, and not in ways that are expansive enough to support everyone. We build them to protect ourselves and each other from the state. We believe in the power of regular people to make the kinds of neighborhoods we want to live in. I know this work is not easy. It requires a lifetime of reconsidering what we have learned about the role of our governments, the role of our police, and our own roles as people constantly in relation to others. No one can do this work alone. I often meet with other community organizers for a meal or a drink and we sigh a deep sigh of relief just to be in each others’ company and to be understood without having to explain.
I share these anecdotes about my neighborhood with you in order to help you see the many ways in which a world without police already exists. I think it is just as important for us to share stories about community safety and community support as it is for us to share stories about the violence of the police. Every day that I look at the news is a bad day. But every day that I look at my neighborhood and at the people who make this place safe with me is a good day. I see the harm built into the social structures we live in, but I also see the boarding house community dinners, the community fridges, the relationships between housed and unhoused neighbors. I hold both that good and bad in tension and try to understand the nuances of what it is we’re all doing here in this neighborhood, in this country, on this earth, trying to live and breathe together.