SMR Breonna
Did Breonna Taylor grand jury make the right call?
08:12 - Source: CNN

Editor’s Note: Derrick Johnson is the president and CEO of the NAACP, America’s largest civil rights organization. Follow him on Twitter @DerrickNAACP. Gina Clayton-Johnson is an attorney, organizer, and on the Policy Table Leadership team for the Movement for Black Lives. She is the Founder & Executive Director of Essie Justice Group. The views expressed in this commentary are their own. Read more opinion articles on CNN.

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The grand jury’s decision to not charge the officers who killed Breonna Taylor was heartbreaking in its familiarity. From Eric Garner to Michael Brown to Sandra Bland and now Breonna Taylor, the murder of Black people by law enforcement in this country often seems not to be considered a crime. The grand jury in Kentucky played into this painful feedback loop, charging one officer out of three for wanton endangerment, but not for taking Breonna’s life.

“Black Lives Matter” is not just a phrase for us. As organizers, civil rights advocates, and Black people, it is an affirmation of our humanity, and a rallying cry for policy change.

The BREATHE Act is that policy. Created by the Movement for Black Lives amidst this national reckoning on race, the BREATHE Act seeks to divest federal funds from the main programs and agencies that have been fueling mass incarceration at state and local levels. It would then invest these funds to build a new model of public safety that doesn’t rely on jails, prisons, and punishment.

For decades, the United States has defunded real public safety infrastructure (such as access to housing, mental and physical health care, education, and living-wage jobs) in ways that have created dangerous conditions for Black lives. A report from the New York Times earlier this summer found that in Boston, Los Angeles and Milwaukee, about one in $10 dollars of local government spending goes to the police.

Programs that enable this approach, including the Department of Defense 1033 program, which distributes weapons of war like assault rifles, grenade launchers, and night-vision sniper scopes to local police departments, are largely funded by the federal government.

Our organizations, the NAACP and the Movement for Black Lives, see a future for Black people in which access to health care, education, clean air, water, and housing is available for all. In the last months, we have agitated in the streets, built community-based infrastructure, made our case to elected officials, and crafted policy solutions – and we’ve done it together. We are now moving to advance policy that is the surest and straightest path to the safety and well-being of Black communities.

The promise of the BREATHE Act is that it scales back what isn’t working and lets us build something new. Today, police have become the one-stop shop for everything from social problems to annoyances. Despite a fervent mythology of “fighting crime,” police departments in cities surveyed by the New York Times only spend 4% of their time responding to violent incidents. With large budgets and staffs, many police departments must justify their payrolls, and thus have strong incentives to make arrests.

In Los Angeles, for example, the most common type of police work is LAPD-initiated stops of drivers and pedestrians for perceived violations – and Black drivers are stopped at five times their share of the city’s population, according to a Los Angeles Times investigation. Across the country, the massive amount of taxpayer money spent in the name of public safety is creating an environment of harassment, surveillance, and danger for Black people.

We are disproportionately victimized by police and interpersonal violence. Black women in particular are killed at a rate of 4.4 per 100,000 people, about double the rate of women of any other race, and there is an epidemic of fatal violence against Black transgender people. Overly aggressive policing and mass incarceration have only contributed to this devastating reality.

Instead of this punishment paradigm, the BREATHE Act creates a new Community Public Safety Agency which will use grants to replace the harmful criminal legal systems locally with evidence-based public safety infrastructure. Importantly, the act moves the function of public safety out of the Department of Justice and into the Department of Health and Human Services – signaling a dramatic shift in how our society would approach achieving community well-being.

The “defund the police” movement is about safety, not about punishing cops. It is about making a long overdue intervention in the racist project of criminalization.

An early model of today’s exorbitant investment in law enforcement, the 1970s War on Drugs, was explicitly racist. According to John Ehrlichman, a former Richard Nixon administration presidential adviser and architect of the program: “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the (Vietnam) war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities.”

Widespread criminalization today works toward those same ends: to harm Black communities and undermine the progressive agenda. More than six million people are not allowed to vote today due to a felony conviction, something the BREATHE Act would immediately change if passed.

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For generations, Black people have struggled to find safety despite the white supremacist orientation of every facet of our public safety institutions. The defund approach is rooted in the knowledge that de-escalation of violence and peacekeeping are best achieved through trained first responders without weapons.

The kinds of investments that the BREATHE Act outlines in education, healthcare, the environment, wealth generation for working class families, and housing, create public safety by supporting communities.

Our criminal legal system’s failure to deliver justice is not new. Sixty-five years before the Louisville grand jury announced its decision, the men who brutally murdered Emmett Till were acquitted by their Mississippi peers. We can no longer afford to allow racist policies and animus to block out the call for change coming from every corner of this country. The BREATHE Act has the potential to make it possible for Black people and all communities to be safe and free. That can only happen if we choose it.