2006 cr brochure final.pdf

Our Demands

Abolish gang databases and gang injunctions— Tens of thousands of people in Los Angeles are unknowingly and permanently put on the database of “suspected” gang members; gang injunctions are just excuses for police to harass, pick-up, and racially target Black and Latino communities.

Dramatically decrease the number of Police and Sheriffs— Reverse the multi-year policy of stealing from socialwelfare state to feed the Police/Prison State; we are not “under policed” but under resourced in social services.

Decriminalize truancy— Students arriving late at schools because of overcrowded buses shouldn’t be given $250 truancy tickets and held in truancy rooms missing hours of instruction.

Open Borders, Amnesty Now!— No collaboration of Police and Sheriffs with ICE to “fast track” deportations by circumventing Special Order 40.

Stop Broken Windows and the “Safer Cities” Initiative—These racially motivated theories of policing are the criminalization of urban life and racial profiling at it’s finest.

What We Believe

Free the U.S. 2 million! We need to free the prisoners and end the criminalization of oppressed nationality communities. In 1980, at the height of the Reagan administration’s law and order regime, there were 500,000 people in U.S. prisons. Today, there are 2.3 million. These are our sisters and brothers. Of those 2.3 million human beings almost 1 million are Black and more than 500,000 are Latino. This level of structural racism is a human rights violation against internally oppressed peoples. We must build a national and international movement for self determination and against national oppression both inside and outside the borders of the US.
We challenge the escalating rate of imprisonment among Black, Chicano/Latino peoples, immigrants, and working people. The US has moved from being the biggest slaveholder in the world to becoming the biggest jailer in the world. We see our work in Los Angeles, as well as in California, as helping build a national and international movement to free the prisoners. While California’s alleged liberalism is not only reflected but also exposed in a bi-partisan reactionary politics—measured one cell at a time. The most recent measurement came in May 2007, when both parties of the CA Legislature voted to increase CA Corrections prisons and jails by 53,000 new cells for the soon to be growing 172,000 prisoners spurred on by each new law passed and each new cage built.

The Role of the Bi-partisan Right
Right wing ideology that places the “Criminal”, “Terrorist” and “Illegal” labels on non-white peoples is so strong that it is reflected in a bi-partisan alliance of both conservative Right as well as Liberal politicians on the federal and local levels, from Governor Schwarzenegger to Speaker of the Assembly Fabian Nunez, from George Bush to Bill Clinton’s “effective death penalty and anti-terrorism” Act. This call for a national security state -- that begins with fences, wire-taps, “non-lethal weapons” and ends with deportations, indefinite detentions and torture -- has made huge ideological inroads into our communities and has rolled back many of the gains of the Civil Rights movement.

An Anti-Racist Alternative
We need all community-based groups to build a broad alliance to generate an anti-racist alternative ideology, to challenge the “lock-em-up and throw away the key” mentality. Today, we have Black and Latino community members being won over by the mainstream’s political campaign sound bites that create a feeding frenzy around a hyped-up gang scare, and the infinite need for thousands of more police. This police and prison haze has been sent to suppress our communities’ desire for rights and protections as overwhelmed parents try to raise their children in communities devoid of self-sustaining infrastructure, without adequate transportation, jobs or education. Our children suffer from the painful reality of colonialism and yet the system tries to suppress resistance through an ideology of identification with the oppressor and racial and cultural self-hatred. We believe the blame must be placed on a culture that supports violence against women as well as violence and dis-unity between and within racially oppressed communities. Individual acts that embody this culture are not excusable yet we know that the way to hold people accountable while giving them a way to restore their humanity is not to further dehumanize them by putting them in cages. Through intervention, mental health programs, medical treatment of drug addiction and living wage jobs we can collectively give back to the community.

The Community Rights Campaign is organizing in the battle of ideas. We want to ideologically challenge institutional oppressions and the systems insatiable drive for a more heavily armored Prison/Police State. Our movement is fighting for the expansion of democratic rights and the reconstruction of the Social Welfare State through a process of movement building and race and class struggle. We want to shift the debate, starting with the oppressed themselves moving from a police/prisons/punishment approach to a resources/reparations/redistribution approach that will make our communities mentally healthy and collectively self-assertive. We see our public safety in the challenge to the Prison/Police State -- not by compliance or alliance with it.

Black Codes to the Racist Re-enslavement Complex
The Community Rights Campaign targets the root causes of the imprisonment and tracking of entire communities into prison cells. Racially discriminatory drug laws, mandatory minimums, gang enhancements and regional gang databases create a sticky web of race, class and gender oppression that adheres to the skin of Black and Latino peoples, women, and the working poor. Much like the historic Black Codes, these new laws have been used to target particular groups resulting in their decreased political participation and plummeting economic stability. The Racist Re-enslavement complex and the rising Police/Prison State supports this violence by taking away peoples ability to survive and then criminalizing their survival.

The Racist Re-enslavement Complex
This country has a hatred of Black people and a growing hatred of Latinos which is manifested in the fact that the mostly of color, US prison population accounts for 25% of the world’s 9 million total prisoners. Therefore, we feel that the Racist Re-enslavement Complex more clearly speaks to the racism that is inherent in, and defining of the criminal injustice system. We feel that this is a vital addition that goes beyond the important contribution of the formulation “prison-industrial complex.” The imperialist system is rooted in monopoly capitalism’s drive to oppress entire nations and peoples (both inside and outside the current borders of the US and other G8 countries). That system, rooted in economic imperatives, is reflected through its specific development with a racist, white supremacist culture that permeates the entire working class and the entire society—and must be fought in the most upfront and counter-hegemonic manner. We think the understanding of the U.S. as a white settler state is essential to understand the magnitude of the human rights abuses rooted in a history of genocide, slavery, conquest, and white supremacy because it doesn’t just reduce the growing police state to only an economic motive.

Manufactured “Crime”
In our view, we do not need more police to “protect” our communities. We need the decriminalization of the more than 1500 new laws that have been put on the books since the early 1980s that criminalize everyday life. We think that regressive law enforcement trends in pre-emptive strike ‘crime prevention’ programs, such as LA Police Chief William Bratton’s “Broken Windows” policies are a way to imprison inner-city youth for the most minor infractions. All types of crimes (property, firearm related and so called “violent” crime) have been on the decline since the late 1970s according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. However, with the explosion of racially targeted laws and uninterrupted prison construction -- the numbers of prisoners continue to expand on a geometric scale.
It should be an agreed-upon progressive principle to reduce the number of actions designated as crimes, parole violations, as well as reducing the number of prisons and police. Police spending accounts for 37% of the payouts in the 2007/08 Los Angeles City Budget. If the movement’s campaigns don’t squarely address the insatiable hunger of the Police/Prison State, not only are we supporting its expansion, but as we have already seen it’s growth will rapidly consume the little resources that are still left for the social welfare state and engulf the communities that it is suppose to support. Crime is not the exclusive domain of Black and Latino peoples even though you wouldn’t know it if you looked at who is in prison and on Death row. Crime occurs when people that have been historically marginalized and oppressed, compete for scarcer resources. Community Rights therefore prioritizes the expansion of the Social Welfare State and not the current trend that expands the Police/Prison State. Simply put, if we reconstruct and expand the social safety net, provide living wage jobs and high quality public education then there will be less people teetering on the edge ofthe prison system.

How We Are Going To Do It

Hey LAUSD I’m Pre-Med, Pre-Job
But NOT Pre-Prison

Schools have become the satellite institutions for the Racist
Re-enslavement Complex. Instead of being educated andgiven proper
resources to ensure their success, Black and Latino students, whom make
the majority in public schools, are met with discipline policies that
are increasingly synonymous with criminalization; from increased police
presence on campus, abuse of power by police and security as well as
truancy tickets.

Our youth members are working with anti-racist teachers to organize
on Los Angeles Unified School District High- school campuses to collect
data on possible human and civil rights violations being perpetrated by
police presence on campus as they are “enrolled” and “data-based” into
the criminal justice system. Instead of teaching pre-med and pre-law,
schools have become pre-prisons where huge numbers of students are
warehoused.

-- Youth media work, petition as well as organizing drives
-- Creation of a rich cultural component of Hip-hop, Spoken- word and musical performance to draw in all types of students
-- Campaign to stop the use of Gang databases
-- Campaign to stop the use of truancy tickets as a form of discipline on school campus

Youth Organizer Training Modeled after the Strategy Center’s
National School for Strategic Organizing, the Summer Youth Organizing
Academy trains High School and College students how to organize, build
and lead campaigns.

Summer Youth Organizing Academy

-- A seven week program that pairs youth up with experienced organizer mentors to deepen their organizing skills
-- Political education that brings together Left theory and on the ground practice, co-facilitated by Academy graduates
-- On the bus organizing, campaign planning and fundraising skills

Spring break Organizing Academy

-- One week of intensive training on organizing skills, contact
development and campaign planning which culminates with legislative
visits and/or street actions

Taking the Initiative

This new campaign is to build an educated, independent, progressive
voting bloc. Our focus is to anticipate forthcoming right-wing
initiatives, and produce and distribute trilingual flyers and
hard-hitting voter education pamphlets to a multiracial movement. Our
key constituency: grassroots groups in Los Angeles and the San
Francisco/Oakland Bay area, with a broad statewide reach throughout
California.
-- Political education of our members on how to go out to classrooms,
buses and front doors to fight against xenophobic, racist, anti-gay and
anti-women propositions
-- Help create an alternate political line and change the debate so
that the Right doesn’t split our communities nor covertly justifies the
stripping of our rights.

On any day in Los Angeles, Strategy Center and Bus Riders Union
organizers are working at local high schools and on the buses to build
a movement to fight the growing police state, and the criminalization
of Black and Latino communities.