Rally to Stop the Violence: Money for Prevention not Police

Education not Incarceration (http://www.ednotinc.org) Rally
to Stop the Violence- Money for Prevention, not
Police
Tuesday, July 20th
5PM Oakland City Hall (14th and Broadway)

STOP THE VIOLENCE: SAY NO TO MORE COPS!
True violence prevention begins when we stop the
violence done to us every day and invest in our
communities, rather than the police department, our
racist criminal justice system, and prisons. Join the
Education Not Incarceration Coalition on July 20th to
protest the Oakland City Council's plan to put a
measure on the November ballot that calls for more
money to hire more Police. While the City Council
bickers over whether to spend 60% or 50% of violence
prevention money on more cops, we say no to any amount
of cops.

Increasing the police presence within the city will
not make anyone safer.
It will only increase tensions and perpetuate the
cycle of poor people and people of color being
criminalized and sent to prison. In the last twenty
years, California has built 23 prisons and only one
university. If we closed prisons the state's own
numbers say we don't need, we could restore the
funding for UC and CSU Outreach Programs. The decision
on who the next generation of educators will be is
being made right now.

On the night that the Oakland City Council renews its
declaration of a local emergency due to the AIDS
epidemic and the city's commitment to compassionate
use of cannabis, we are demanding that the city commit
itself to acknowledging that more police will not
bring health, safety, education, and jobs to Oakland.
We need to break from the national obsession with
throwing more police at our social problems, and
Oakland can lead the way.

Selling more police as the answer to all that ails us
is a false hope that
has already failed to curb the city's murder rate.
Increasing the number of
police raises tension and intensifies the targeting
and criminalization of
people of color, working-class people, and the poor,
and permanently
subjects them to discrimination by marking their
record. The police have
not been an effective means of violence prevention in
the past, and it is
time we try something else.

We have seen a runaway Police Department that doesn't
have to account for the money it spends, that bleeds
the city dry with overtime costs and payouts on
brutality cases, that doesn't implement its own risk
management procedures, and that apologizes for
mistakes but never learns from them. We have seen a
city government that has taken away from positive
aspects of the community, such as pushing young people
of color out of Lake Merritt, locking people out of
the Alice Arts Center, and pushing the sideshows out
of the Eastmont Town Center. We have seen the police
force come break up the unique spaces in this city
that allow people of all kinds to congregate, to clear
the way for a gentrified arts scene that pushed the
diversity and sprit of Oakland out of town.

We know that the strength of Oakland is its heritage,
the long-time
residents who stay and work here every day. We need
real investment in the real community-based
peacemakers, the people who have made something out of
nothing and are building organizations to transform
their communities. When we know our neighbors and we
know our rights, we are powerful; give us the tools,
and we can build peace and justice throughout the
city, from the ground up.