Daniel Kisslinger: Welcome to another episode of One Million Experiments. I'm Kiss.
Damon Williams: I'm Damon, and we're doing it. One Million Experiments is a podcast showcasing exploring how we define and create safety in a world without police and prisons. We are back with co-hosts-- Doesn't feel like it really does it justice. We're back with superhomie and collaborator, friend, partner in this work. Our lab partner here, Eva is back in the building with us. What's up, Eva?
Eva Nagao: Howdy, partners. Nice to be back in the lab with you.
Daniel: I like this lab partner thing you just did there. That's strong.
Damon: That was organic too. That was some organic chemistry right there.
Daniel: We've alluded to the fact of how much we both faked and cheated our way through science. The lab partner relationship was not a subject-to-subject fair relationship in my life, so I'm excited to model for myself what a more equitable lab partner relationship could be here, Eva. In that spirit, one, how you feeling today? Two, who are we talking to on this episode?
Eva: I'm a little bit tired today. I'm coming off a very cool conference and convening, Abolition is Feminism, Feminism is Abolition that Interrupting Criminalization did out in California, where I got to meet with so many of the people that we talk about in this podcast, and that we work with, in One Million Experiments. That being said, I am still so excited to talk with Detroit Safety Team and dig in once again, in this sixth episode of the series.
Damon: I just want to name how excited and equally jealous I am to hear that there was, one, abolitionist conference, and it was in California. These are my two passions happening-- Being in California--
Daniel: California is Damon's imagine future, [giggles] I think it's safe to say. What do we need to know about Detroit Safety Team before we hop in?
Eva: The Detroit Safety Team has been on the One Million Experiments list since the beginning. It was something that was born out of a movement-building space and has really gone from seed to something really remarkable in these last couple of years in Detroit. The Detroit Safety Team is a Detroit-focused organization dedicated to assisting communities in building a new safety infrastructure that shifts away from police reliance. The team does this through city-wide training sessions and neighborhood fellowship programs that skill people up in holistic and humane safety methods and tools.
There's three prongs to the work that DST does. It's safety training, community building, and restorative processes. You can go to redefinesafety.org if you're in Detroit to request the service, and you can also look up when the next city-wide training cohort is. If you're interested in skilling up in nonviolent restorative practices, de-escalation, mediation, pod mapping, Detroit Safety Team really has it all.
Daniel: We get into-- a little bit to how those programs work. I think this conversation is more on the macro level, about what does this idea of safety even mean, if we're redefining it, what are we redefining it toward, what have they learned in process that's changed their definitions of it, and what does it mean to do this work, and then how does it fit into larger-scale advocacy across the city. The balance of these very local block by block efforts with policy and political work, and the potential and frustrations and challenges of doing both. Dame, anything else that you want people to know before we hop in?
Damon: Yes. I'm really excited for folks to hear, first, the process a little bit, but the contradictions of engaging the state in these efforts. You will hear about a really interesting structural opportunity and moment in Detroit, and the ways in which established power works to suppress and subvert democratic efforts. I think really feeling some of the impact of that was important learnings for me. Excited to get into it.
Daniel: All right. I think the experiment is prepped. Let's hop into the lab with the Detroit Safety Team.
[music]
Damon: We are back. We are here with some informal cousins. The Chicago to Detroit connection is in full effect. We are really excited to be talking to the Detroit Safety Team. As always, we have a two-part question that we'd like to kick off our conversation with, warm us up and get us going and flow. That question is rooted in time. Define time however you will. That could be this hour, this day, this season, this lifetime. How is the world treating you, and how are you treating the world?
Curtis Renee: [laughs] Jump into it. [laughs]
Damon: Let's swim.
Curtis: I want to start off saying, time is this really weird thing for me. I'm very time disconnected. I'm late for things and lose track of time. [laughs]
Daniel: There was an all-knowing nod from--
[laughter]
Curtis: We've worked together for a lifetime. I think especially with this pandemic, time is also really weird. I'll be like, "That was like was last month." Sike, that was two years ago. I think currently the world is teaching me a lot of lessons around reconnecting to myself and reconnecting to family, whether that be blood or chosen. That feels mostly really good, and sometimes really frustrating because sometimes when we're healing and discovering ourselves, we're like, "I thought I did this already." Some of these lessons are relearning, and I'm like, "Don't get frustrated. There's something deeper in this lesson that you're learning."
How am I treating the world? The first thing that popped up is, over the summer, there was this really big flood here in Detroit, and my car was in about four feet of water. Both of my trash cans floated away somewhere, so currently, I don't have a recycling bin. I've been yelling at people at the city of Detroit to bring me a recycling bin. I would like to treat the world better and recycle. [laughs] Really recently, I went out to take a walk and admire some nature and admire some Detroit. Took some photos. When I think about how am I treating really specifically Detroit and nature, admiring, being in awe of its beauty.
Daniel: John, what about you?
John Sloan III: It's a big question in a lot of ways. The conundrum that I'm having is just around what measurement of time. It's like tax season. It is for everybody, and everybody's doing their taxes.
Damon: Not everybody.
[laughter]
Curtis: Just abolitionists.
[laughter]
John: As a small business owner-- I have a small business in my non-activist work life. Though, is there a non-activist work life, I guess is another conversation-- I'm doing taxes, and I'm sitting here going, "What happened? What year is this? How are we in 2022 already?" This whole concept of how am I being treated in this moment, if I consider the more wide-angle lens, 50,000-foot view, the past two years have been crazy. Been a lot of up and downs. I've lost a few friends. I think there's an expectation sometimes when you do this type of work, that you are always ready and willing and able to help other people hold their trauma, and help other people process their grief.
The time isn't always built-in if you did the same thing. Right before we hopped on, a friend of mine's texting me about a memorial service for a good friend of ours. I'm trying to balance all those things in life. I'm mad to some extent as to how the world has treated me over these past couple of years. Also, when I shrink the world down from the global to my immediate circle, I have zero things to complain about. I'm blessed to have a wonderful fiancée, wonderful family, great group of friends.
Curtis and I, in addition to working together, are also very close, just as friends. That support is there, and is really important. If I stop and just look at what is right now in this moment, then the world is treating me pretty well, in the today. It's when I think about yesterday and last year that I start to get frustrated. How am I treating the world? I hope the world is okay with me.
Full transparency, I got asked at a meeting earlier if I can say please more often. I was like, "Maybe I'm not treating the world well." I think it's also important to remember that those small moments-- How you treat the world, I think is reflected by how you treat people in those small everyday moments. If I'm not leading with gratitude, and I needed to quickly be reminded of that, then that's something that I got to check in with myself about, and how was that reflective of how I'm treating everybody else.
Damon: I appreciate that. Just hearing that honest discontent with just how absurd and disorienting these last few years and months have been for all of us, but then also I appreciate that notion of internal accountability. The macro-social structures we are ideating towards require micro transformations in human relationships. Just that as a grounding is really exciting. I want to stay in that place of excitement because we are here in Chicago, sharing some of our unofficial love affair with Detroit as family members and kindred cousins.
Just to ground us a little bit, our show is ideologically rooted in the lineage, legacy of the Boggs. Jimmy and Grace are really important to our thinking and lot of the work we've been able to do on and off-mic. Mentors of our work are from Detroit, so always felt very connected personally. Then Detroit as a metropolitan landscape of what social transformation, divestment, recreation, revolution honestly looks like, it's been one of the most important places in the world. Really excited to get into y'all's work. The way we're going to do that is through a loosely, poorly formed metaphor. [laughs]
We're here talking about experiments in the language of experimentation. As two folks that cheated or slacked our way through high school science, we always find ourselves over our head and we invite our compatriots to fumble through this metaphor with us. We're going to start off with that, of the hypothesis of the work. I even hate using this term. It's too activist-y. The theory of change that informed your ideals, or your projections, or your visions that started this work of the Detroit Safety Team.
Speaker 2: I'll tell you my hypothesis.
All: [gasps]
Curtis: I will say I have a long background in non-violence and reconciliation and that sort of thing. I feel like I stand on the backs of a lot of work that has shaped me. I want to lift up ancestor Ron Scott, who started the coalition against police brutality, here in Detroit. Him and my father are really close friends. I said in those meetings, as a high schooler, sometimes really...but fast-forwarding to some of the first thoughts of Detroit Safety Team, we were birthed out of the Allied Media Conference. For folks that aren't familiar with the Allied Media Conference, is this really wonderful, spectacular outer space weekend that happens in Detroit.
It brings together activists and media makers. They get to co-create with each other for a whole weekend. One year, I was working at the Detroit Area Restorative Justice Center...and we were asked to support with safety. We were doing this work in over three years. I think some of the questions that happened over that three years were like, "Hey--" Initially, the safety team were a bunch of folks that were not from the city.
Also, the acknowledgment that although we love the Allied Media Conference, a lot of Detroiters put a lot of energy into that conference, and a lot of that energy then leaves Detroit because all of these really great people go back into the spaces where they're organizing. We were like, "How do we keep some of that energy here?" Then that evolved into, "Hey, we're doing this for a weekend where we're supporting people in safety."
Because the conference generally happens at Wednesday's campus, we're asking campus police to not be involved in anything that happens. The first call that goes out is the conference safety team. We're doing this for a weekend at night events and during the whole conference over the phone, in text messages navigating people that have gone mistakenly to Canada, back into Detroit.
[laughter]
Daniel: That's maybe the only place where you could easily make that wrong turn, is Detroit.
Curtis: Very easily. [laughs]
John: If you're not from here, you end up on a highway if you're not paying attention, and then you're in Can-- You can't turn around. You can't get off. Now they're like, "Hey, now you here."
Curtis: Can't turn around. You're there. You're on this bridge and you're committed.
Daniel: I'll just Zoom in from Windsor. I don't have to tell you.
Curtis: Right. That then developed into, "Why can't we do this in Detroit? Why are we only doing this once a year, during one weekend of the summer?", which seemed such a big question because I think geographically, Detroit is really big. Thinking about all the types of harm that are happening across the city, it felt really, really big. How can we possibly do this? A lot of the questions were like, "Will people need training? How do we train more people to be able to do this work?" There are not enough people.
John: The only thing that I would add is in the qualification of this work. Very specifically, Detroit Safety Team believes that this current system of policing and justice, as it's built, is doing exactly what it was designed to do, which is not to keep a large group of people safe, it's to maintain a social order and status quo. When you talk to somebody about what it means to be safe, they start thinking about all these global things that contribute to their safety. The ability to keep a roof over their heads, their ability to know that their kids can play and have green space. They don't talk about policing.
What DST does is, we build up a system and an apparatus to take the place of what we know is here for stratification. Detroit Safety Team exists to be able to say-- Lot of people talk about tearing stuff down. Great. Tear it down. Abolish all of it.-- "What's going to exist in its place? What systems can we build that center the needs of the community, that put more agency into the community members to define what safety looks like for them, for their block, for their neighborhood, for their city?" That remove a lot of those structures that equate safety and security as being the same thing, that equates safety and policing as being the same thing, and that really divorcing that from a concept that we know is racialized, and that we know is steeped in processes of oppression from day one.
Daniel: I'm just going to put a pin in a couple of things that I want to make sure we talk about. I want to talk about that scale-up and idea of moving from a weekend in one space to a lifetime across the city. That was one. Dame, I know this is right in this breakdown of safety, security, the false dichotomies of that. Maybe you could--
Damon: I'll start there. I want to say I come into this blazon but also hesitant because language and words, or vocabulary is something-- it's really important to us. I think there's value in digging and deconstructing and finding new language, but then also, sometimes it can get in the way of the point that folks try to make. I'm just being careful in myself. We've been doing this show that is talking with all these projects about reimagining safety. From my work, organizing abolitionist campaigns, and the language in 2014, 2015, that really was emerging. It's like the police don't keep us safe.
Kept saying that, and threw that questioning and asking and canvassing, what do you need to be safe? What does safety mean to you? The more and more I just looked at the definition of the word and the way in which it is deployed, safety to me is the absence of risk, danger, or threat in how it's defined, and then security is the state of being safe. For me, on a political philosophy tip, it feels like that's a really important personal social dynamic in terms of relationship, but it has felt like it is a false political ideal that has been propagandized to us that there actually is no political reality where everyone is safe, risk and harm is, one, just a part of life and that also, we respond and have different relationships to that.
Some of the language that's emerged in that is, instead of using safety and security, wellness and protection as proactive words that are not about the absence or not about a negative ideal. Just the notion of safety, it has felt to me like a false promise that actually validates violent dominance because it can't happen. Therefore, let's always invest in this type of dominance to give this illusion of safety. I offer that to y'all, not to then respond and let's get super theoretical, I would love to hear from your experience and the work that y'all have done from working to the conference, to then into the community. How does my thinking line up or not line up to the real experience in the work?
John: I would invite us to think about safety not being as a destination. It's not a static place. We're trying to get to this place. Once we get there, we're done. We're good. We did all the things. That's it.
Damon: Good job. You're now safe. Go on and be...
John: Right. Now you are safe. Live your life. Safety is a process. It's an understanding of how we're working through this process, in collaboration with those people in our environment. Basically, in southwest Detroit, what safety means for me is going to look different from what safety means for Curtis on the east side. Same city, two very different neighborhoods. That's going to look different in Detroit from what it's going to look like in Chicago.
I appreciate your point about this being a falsehood almost, this idea that we are being told, "Oh, if you do these things, if you vote for these people, if you push this legislation, then we can get you to a point where everybody is safe." That looks like having these individuals walk around in uniforms with guns and badges patrolling your neighborhood and keeping the bad people out. The idea that that is what safety is, I think is completely false and only serves to continue to prop up the social hierarchy and dynamic.
What safety can be, though, is it can be an understanding of alignment and process, alignment and goals, and not about the destination, but about how we all, how the four of us would talk through arriving at a point where we're all safe, and recognizing that when that doesn't happen, if I don't feel safe in the space with the three of you, that there are measures, processes put in place where we can work through that. We can understand if there's been hurt or harm, and we can start working towards what that can look like on the other side. I will also say as I wrap up my statement, that anything I say, whether it's eloquent or not, pales in comparison to the depth of knowledge of Curtis Renee on this topic in specific.
Daniel: I love it. I'll just keep introing you till-- It's fantastic.
Curtis: I think one of the first things that's coming up for me is, we're in the middle of a city-wide fellowship here with Detroit Safety Team. We were having a conversation about how we're engaging folks around disbarring the Green Light project here, which is a camera surveillance that is across Detroit. A lot of folks that generally are like, "I'm all about this green light. I'm all about this camera surveillance." are also all about the mayor-- That I'm not for-- but are generally elderly folks that also are very heavily involved in church...talking about safety with everyone, it's like how do we not be like, "Oh, well, this is just wrong." but how do we first acknowledge the space of everyone wants that feeling? I don't want to feel like I'm going to re-traumatize myself every time I walk out my door. That is something that most people long for. How do we acknowledge that feeling and that longing of wanting that as a community? Then from there, some of these things are similar. You want to feel safe, I want to feel safe. What does that feel like for you? When you see it in your community, what does that look like for you and from that common space?
I think that with police and surveillance and all these things when we're talking about redefining safety, it feels like we've become completely disconnected from this word, and this act, as a community, like how we're building this for ourselves as a community. Some of that also is like, how are we reconnecting to how we're building this and assembling this in our community spaces, and not just handing it off to someone and saying like, "Hey, you, police officer, you, Mayor, you're now in charge of creating this space that feels safe for everyone in this community." even though Detroit police don't even have to live in Detroit anymore.
A lot of times, they don't even know what that means for me because...someone that lives in Roseville, and their whole family has lived in a suburb of Detroit like their whole family has. What does it look like to reconnect to defining that for ourselves, and reconnect to creating that for ourselves? It's not like this final destination, which I feel like, sometimes, things can feel that way, like, "Oh, I am no longer racist. No longer. [laughs] That box is checked. What are you talking about?" but like this ongoing process because there always are going to be contradictions. We're always going to be growing. There's always going to be conflict. The point of being safe is not to alleviate conflict but to figure out when we get in those moments, how are we moving and navigating those moments so that we're not continuously harming each other in conflict?
Damon: In this discussion of safety as a process, I'm really thinking of collective trust-building and trust-building from this notion of truth. Are we having an agreed-upon experience? Are we able to connect? What I hear that is valuable is-- I think a lot of my challenge of safety has been, one, on a personal level, it can be a stopgap of like, "I don't feel safe, so now I have to stop." Then secondly, when I hear it in the structural sense, it's usually about redistributing risk to more vulnerable people.
The cliché on the news, somebody gets hurt in a well-resourced community and they say, "That's not supposed to happen here. This is a safe community." which then is explicitly saying that is supposed to happen somewhere else. What I hear in this process and that it's never static is, it is not about redistributing that risk to somewhere, it is actually about honestly addressing it. All right, Kiss, jump in there.
Daniel: To that point, in hearing you talk about that communal self-determination work, I'm curious, what have you learned? How have those conversations been going as you're doing these trainings? What are the tools that have been most meaningful and useful for folks? What have come out of building this ecosystem of people rethinking and re-discussing and readdressing harm and building this safety as process?
John: I got to go back half a second and touch on bridging that previous conversation into this one for a sec. I think what is inherent and something that we try to say a lot is, we're not trying to set ourselves up or present ourselves as the experts. You don't come to Detroit Safety Team because we know everything about all-- Though, Curtis is looking right now because I tend to have a-- "No, I know all." You don't have to do that, change out a carburetor. I don't even know where it is, but I can do it.
Daniel: You're like, "No. My phone works in the shower. I am competent."
John: I have no problem taking meetings everywhere. We're conduits, right? When you think about what does it mean to be in community and say, "Hey, we need to pull the centering of this authority from the state."-- It shouldn't live with the mayor. It shouldn't live with James Craig. Thankfully, now he's out of office. If you don't know who he is, he's a former Chief of Police for the city of Detroit, who's now running for--
Curtis: For governor.
John: We don't like him. I don't know the man. I'm sure he's a very nice person.
Daniel: Or not. He might not be.
John: Or maybe not.
Curtis: Maybe not.
Damon: There's that likelihood that he actually isn't.
John: Maybe he's actually not. I don't know. As we work on pulling the agency back into the communities, what it also inherently means, is that there's responsibility then owned in those communities for folks to be able to work together and not towards a destination but through that process. I want to be really careful here with the point you made, Dame, earlier about, "That shouldn't happen in this neighborhood. That should happen somewhere else."
There's a conversation that I think happens, and that should be continuous, and it's happening inside of the community, into our community conversation, and then from community to community across the city, as we continually think about what that process of safety is and what that means. That's one thing I want to say on that tip. I do also know that you were asking a question around what we have learned in this process. As we've gone in and trained, I've learned so much more about myself than I necessarily assumed that I would at the onset because the beauty of-- Curtis...responsible for their curriculum and training.
The beauty of the system that Curtis has designed is it continually asks all of you to ask questions. I'm constantly being asked questions. I'm constantly interfacing with members of the community, in this space of "Cool. Does what made me feel safe last year make me feel safe today? How can I continue in this process?" If anything, from a global sense, it's taught me to be more self-reflective, it's helped reinforce for me, as a...head, the difference between weakness and vulnerability and constantly trying to interrogate that line for myself and being able to do so in a space where I know there is openness to be able to walk through that process as myself.
Curtis: I think one of the biggest things that I've learned personally is, one, not being afraid to make mistakes. I do a lot of the support work for processes, community accountability, and transformative and circles. I think that's a big part in being abolitionist, this acknowledgment of like, "Man, this fucking sucks. It's not working.
[laughter]
Or it is working and we need to throw it away because it's doing what it's supposed to do and we don't want it doing that no more."
Damon: We need that toolkit. We come out with these 100-page toolkits, but like, "This fucking sucks tool kit."
Curtis: This fucking sucks.
[laughter]
Damon: How to process through the incongruences of emotional abolitionist community. I love that.
Curtis: Like this, that acknowledgment and also, acknowledgment that this is a system I've lived in for my whole life. This is what generationally my family has lived in. Different iterations of it, but it's this. When we're talking about redefining and reimagining, the first step is like, "Oh, this fucking sucks." Then this acknowledgment that there are parts of it that also live inside of me because this is what I've lived in. That means we're going to make mistakes. Then like, "Oh, well, maybe this will work." Then, as we use it, it's like, "Oh, it's still like this a little bit." or "Also, that shit just didn't work."
Damon: Experimenting.
Curtis: Right. Test that out. I think that is one of the biggest things, not being afraid to try something and not feeling like it needs to be perfect, but being like, "This maybe will work." and coming together with other folks and being like, "Hey, how can we assemble something that will maybe work?" and also, being honest in seeing like, "Oh, maybe this isn't working. What needs to be tweaked? Do we need to start over again?" As more and more people come into this conversation, I feel like we're getting closer to that space of reimagining and redefining what this looks like in community spaces. I feel like that's the biggest thing that I've learned personally.
Damon: Can we dig in there? I know we might not be able to be hyper-specific, but I would love to get into a narrative or a memory that was either challenging or felt like some sort of a breakthrough or a learning moment of that feeling of like, "Oh, this is pushing me towards recalibration." or "This is challenging an assumption or a generalization I was making about this work." Is there something in the project that exemplifies what you were just sharing?
Curtis: The whole pandemic.
[laughter]
Got a lot of that.
[laughter]
Damon: We started talking about time.
Curtis: ...completely back to the drawing board during the pandemic. Just want to acknowledge that. When we first started, we started off with doing a citywide training. It was really short and compact. Then we offered some space for folks to do some shadowing in different areas that we support community members in. We support community members, and events, and navigating harm and conflicts, and then workshops and trainings. We give folks space to shadow in that. After that two years, I talked to this small group of people and was like, "How did that go? How'd you feel about that?"
Some of what I was hearing was like, "Hey, we would like to delve deeper." and it not just be 16 hours of training. John and I started thinking about this like, "How can this happen? Also, initially, we wanted it to be very hyper-local training. Maybe a three to four-block radius community has a safety team that we've trained, which is all up in people's faces in closed doors with no mask. We were like, "We can't do that." [laughs] During pandemic also-- I don't know, I didn't leave my house for a whole year, literally.
Daniel: Talk about reimagining safety.
Curtis: Right. [laughs]
John: Can't even go outside.
Daniel: Prime example.
Curtis: Some of that feedback that we were getting from folks that participated in this program, paired with the pandemic, we want to be able to offer tools that we have. Acknowledging what John said earlier, we're also not the experts on this. We just have these tools, we want to share them with you. How can we also acknowledge that actually people have been doing some of this work in their communities for a really long time, and it's not labeled abolition safety, or-- It's just like, this is how we have to navigate in our spaces to be able to live right next door to each other.
How can you bring some of those tools and acknowledge like, "You've been also doing some of this work already. How do we merge these things together?" This year, we're doing a two-year program, with six or seven months of intensive training and 20 hours of shadowing, and then some space for folks to create a project or create something with each other. We're throwing that up on the wall, again. Then, at the end of this, we'll talk to people and be like, "How did that feel?" and see if at some point we can move to this hyper-local idea that we once had, or are we still creating hybrids of these ideas or what needs to be different and being really humble, if people are like, "Actually, that fucking sucked."
Daniel: You're like, "All right. Add it to the Zoom. Let's keep it moving."
Curtis: Right. That also didn't work. Being able to hear that and hear those things and not feeling like, "Oh, no, this needs to work." and hold onto something so tightly and being afraid that something is going to fail because of the work that has gone into it, I think the evolving of our training, it's definitely started in a place and in a very different place this year.
Damon: I just want to pull out a learning or distill a lesson I'm hearing from what y'all are saying. I'm hearing this re-emphasis of collective evaluation. I'm trying to stop being so meat-based-- Of the meat of the conversation-- I'll say the main course of the meal--
Daniel: The protein of the conversation.
Curtis: Sometimes broccoli is the main course though.
Damon: Right, right, right. I usually say the meat of the conversation.
Curtis: Broccoli does have protein.
Damon: You're not an expert, John.
[laughter]
This notion of collective evaluation, now it is just some afterthought or just like a step, but again, the main course of what the process is, because really, if we compare to our opposition or we compare to the carceral state or police, the truth is, we think the things they do the most as abolitionists is arrest people and use physical force. The thing they actually do the most is keep record. That's at the front end of what policing is. It is poorly filled out paperwork and data collection.
They have so much information, so many patterns, such an understanding of behavior that is then done with C-, sloppy penciled handwriting on these pages that then get lost and don't get filed or get hidden from FOIA request. This notion of-- I think, John, you said-- shifting or redistributing that agency back into the community of all we really need to do is evaluate the way in which human interactions are happening in order to build systems of protection and response.
John: This is why you see-- I don't know if y'all in Chicago are familiar, but we just went through a charter revision process over this last couple of years. Every 13 years, I think, the city of Detroit's charter has to be revised. That's just stated as part of the process of living in the city of Detroit, and working and living underneath this charter. If you think about the charter as the constitution of the city, then every 13 years, you're being asked to craft a new Bill of Rights. This process went on for a couple years. Charter commissioners were elected by Detroit residents.
Those commissioners set about a process to collect all these different recommendations for what should the new charter say, how should it be revised. Then that was all packaged up and put up for a vote. I'm truncating a lot of the story. A vote that the mayor, the governor of the state of Michigan, and all these other people came out and said, "Don't actually vote for these policies." The thing that we're supposed to do every 13 years, prescribed by the state, the thing that we've taken the last two and a half years to enact, the thing that is now put up on as a piece of legislation, that you, all the city of Detroit decided that you wanted, we’re actually going to tell you to vote against, and that we're better off with the current city charter as it's comprised. It was called Proposal P. The huge chunk of what was in Proposal P was that redistribution.
Daniel: If only pushin P had come out in time for this campaign. I just feel the promo opportunity would've been--
John: Would've been so different. It's this conversation on participatory budgeting. What does it look like for the residents of the city to also have a say in how the money is being spent? That was a huge thing people were pushing back against. The redistribution of that budget line item, from the Detroit Police Department that saw, in a four-year span, its budget increase by about $30 million, when you looked at a correlative department in the city's department for civil rights and protections, which is the department that's supposed to be able to let me, as a resident of this city, walk into that office and say, "Hey, this cop over here did X, Y, and Z.", that department saw their budget decrease by $10 million.
Already, you're talking about departments that had budgeted, Detroit police was, I think, 300 million and that department for civil rights and protection was 10 million, so you're not talking about incremental differences. When you start pushing back on those systems, when you start trying to affect where that power lies, and removing that power from the state and recentering that power in the neighborhoods and in the communities, then you're going to see that type of pushback globally. As long as you can keep on fear-mongering, as long as you can go back to what Curtis mentioned earlier, in encouraging certain Detroit residents to be fearful and to like programs like Project Green Light, then you're asking them to accept that false narrative.
Daniel: Dame, to what you were referring to earlier, this self-reflection, communal work of doing that definition, and then the state acting as an intervener in that, it's just baseline so interesting to hear that that's built actually into the infrastructure of the state, that idea of a charter revision. It's fascinating.
Curtis: Doesn't it?
[laughter]
Daniel: It seems like one of those points of-- We talk a lot about how do you confront people in their contradictions. If they just said, "This is what it is," you can't be like, "Oh, you're doing one thing and saying another," but to say like, "We have this democratic process--"
Damon: Don't support it.
Daniel: Exactly. There's a point of challenge there. Maybe I guess the question is what lessons y'all learn from that, and then starting to build these other processes around three to four block radiuses and this type of work of knowing that there is that state potential to subvert. Has that changed how you approach that work at all or is that just par for the course because the state does what the state does?
John: I think it's in both end. I think in some ways, it's par for the course that we weren't surprised that they put out. When I say they put resources into this, they had this Proposal P as a problem. This ad was running on Hulu, I'm watching ESPN, and this thing is popping up. It's all over the place and what that showed us was the amount of financial resources they were willing to commit to the maintenance of the status quo. I think on one side, I don't know that we were surprised. I wasn't at least by the descent, but I think it definitely shifts strategy and maybe if not strategy tactic.
If that is still our goal, then how are we shifting our tactics to be able to arrive at the same place eventually. Some of that I think, I know, personally, I'm still negotiating because that was a bad beat. That was one that we worked on for a while and to see all of that effort in opposition. I'm sure we've all been there. It's sometimes hard to deal with and you want to dust yourself off and get back up and say, "All right, let's dive into this again."
Curtis: Proposals are always mad confusing in any election. I could be very knowledgeable about a proposal and walk in and read the proposal on the ballot and be confused as to if I should be checking yes or no.
Damon: Does this is sound exactly what I agree with or the opposite of what I agree with.
[laughter]
Curtis: Right, like, "Wait, do I need to bring my phone? I need a dictionary?"
Damon: The Freedom Fairness and Justice Act, but it's brigade incarceration up.
[laughter]
Curtis: This acknowledgment, that the system that we're fighting against also is in control of the wording of this proposal. Also, efforts to get out and vote, so getting our numbers up as far as who's going out to vote. I have to say, I'm usually very for voting locally, but I also have a lot of conflict around politics and democracy, whatever democracy means.
Damon: Those are double air quotes.
[laughter]
Curtis: Whatever that word means. Then I was a political science major in college and I think it made it more difficult for me. Also, I think having more boots on the ground, so how do we cover all of Detroit to have this conversation about a proposal like Proposal P? Whether it's, one, there's all these town halls that are going on in all of these different sections of the city, as well as groups that are doing some door knocking, or standing out in front of grocery stores to have this conversation or at parks to have this conversation like
where can we be having this conversation where people are just going to already be and not just, "Oh, come to this place"?
Or this is the time that we're going to do it. This acknowledgment that they had all this money to put behind their effort, we can match that in creativity in how we're having the conversation on a house to house, neighbor to neighbor at our kitchen table type of situation. How are we providing more opportunity across the city of Detroit to be able to have these conversations? Acknowledging we're talking about safety, it's this long-term conversation that's not going to happen overnight, but some things like proposals on ballots need to happen in a year or six months.
Daniel: Yes, how do you meet the urgency of the state without getting wrapped up in it in a way that disrupts the long-term vision work. Yes, that's a great point.
Damon: In considering for time and we have to start wrapping here, I have a little exercise that I want to do, but before I get into it, I just want to commend y'all or just offer my appreciation and affirmation for I am hearing and seeing and feeling like y'all have been in the street, y'all have been doing the work, and so I want to just thank you. It is invaluable and transformational. What I want to do here is a little 404 break for the listeners. I want to recap the story that I've heard. I try to be concise, a few sentence synapses, and I would love for y'all, just in closing, to plug in any major gaps or holes that are not presents or that you would want people who are listening to know about your work and about your story.
Both of you coming out of a lineage of movement work and transformative projects. Curtis, I'm hearing you have a deeper lineage, and shout out to Pops for really being an OG in the game, coming out of being in this hotbed that is Detroit that creates this Mecca, this Allied Media Conference. We are connected to AMP, and we're one of those people that have come in and got all the energy.
Curtis: Oh, this is great, time to go home.
Damon: [chuckles] Got right back on in the space.
John: Yo, it was you two.
Damon: It was us. We are the problem.
Curtis: One in two.
Damon: We are the energy suck. Out of this specific work of a need around this abolitionist space in the contradiction of it existing on a university. We're not going to rely on the police resources to protect this space that is about many things, but one of the highest things is about creating a world without police. In that, have been doing the work, have been in community, have experienced pandemic, which has just altered global humanity and this project in many ways, but still, in the midst of that, there is these pods or these...of three to four folks that have a neighborhood radius that are engaged in community and responding to needs.
In the midst of that, there was also this larger political push in reconstituting the city more or less through the charter of transformative, policy, and redistributive budgetary approaches and participatory democracy at large. It sound like there was a lot of energy and probably learning out of that, but then also, in the technical sense, it was defeated, or there was a counter-slap-down investment that made it not a possibility in iteration. Now y'all are taking those lessons to build more dialogue and discourse to do this collective evaluation.
That is my attempt at my act of listening, what I heard from the work in the project. I would love for y'all to, in closing, what gaps are there important to feel or what else should people know about the work of the Detroit Safety Team?
Curtis: I think just repeating something I said earlier, us not being afraid to make mistakes, and acknowledging we're all in practice. In this space of us not being an expert, as a whole, we are experts in what we all bring to the table.
Damon: Yes, I would just say that as much as Curtis and I, and then shout to other members on our staff and our citywide team that do a lot of this work and support, the work being done, we're only really as effective as the network and the team of people that we work with. We continue to learn so much from that interaction. I would just encourage, if I could be a cheerleader for ourselves for a second, that if anybody is curious, they can go to redefinesafety.org if they want to learn how they can join the city-wide team, how they can jump into some of these trainings.
Even if they might have missed the timeline to sign up for this current cohort, to still try to figure out how they can hop into one of our trainings because as many people can get the training. Look, if everybody ends up getting trained and we don't need to exist anymore, that's fine by me.
Daniel: You all got enough going on. Get out of here.
John: I know, right?
Damon: You've got a business to run, Jesus.
[laughter]
Daniel: Access the phone.
John: See, now I have to file my taxes. I said it out loud. Yes, I'm just encouraged folks like jump on and figure out how they can join in. We're not the only ones to do this work and I don't want to set us up like we are the arbiters of. Just figure out how you can get plugged in and what this looks like for you and what this type of works looks like in your immediate family as those circles broaden out in your household and your community, on your block because that's what we're all trying to do.
Damon: For residents in Detroit, if folks want to access the resource, how should or is the best way to go about getting in touch with y'all?
John: They can hop onto our website, redefinedsafety.org. If they need a service, there's a form, they click on that form, they fill it out, and our administrator will get in touch to be like, "Hey, what do you need?" How can you schedule a meeting, it'll be with another two of us eventually so you can figure out what type of services you need. If you want to support, it's that same thing, redefinesafety.org/donate because this work is heavy. Sometimes we need that additional support and need there as well, or you can just shoot us an email at it's info, I-N-F-O, @redifinesafety.org.
Curtis: We're also on Instagram and Facebook.
Damon: True.
John: We are, I forget about Instagram because I'm old.
[laughter]
Daniel: Disdainfully, we are on Siri.
John: We have a Black Planet page, that's on there too at GEOCities.
Daniel: Thank y'all both so much and look forward to hopefully continuing to stay connected and thank you again for the work you do.
Curtis: Thank y'all.
John: Thank y'all. Thank for this, we appreciate it.
[music]
Damon: All right, oof, we got to break that down. We got to bring Eva back and let's do our peer review. Let's debrief, let's process. Let's go through the notes. What are we learning? What are we thinking? What are we feeling coming out of this experiment talking with the Detroit Safety Team?
[music]
Hoping I don't offend all my peers.
Eva, you wanna get in there?
Eva: Yes. I came in the lab today explaining how I came off this trip talking to a bunch of defund organizers across the country this past weekend. This conversation really brings a lot of the points that interrupting criminalization is seeing across the board nationally. This is such a moment in our abolitionist movement building. We had such an expansion of opportunities to grow consciousness, to grow base for collective action these past couple of years. We worked our asses off these couple of years and people are tired and rightfully so. What's so nice about talking to Detroit Safety Team is also to show that this tiredness isn't a lack of enthusiasm.
It's not a lack of momentum, it's just that sometimes you go hard and you need to regroup and rest. I think Curtis asked at the top, how to do we train more people to do this work? There aren't enough people. That's a question so many of us had before a lot of these experiments started and DST is such a good example of that how. Taking something from that seat of an idea at a conference for one weekend, from one block, from one pod, and expanding that to really share skills among community and to build our meaning of safety together.
Damon: I want to dig in on that last part there of the fact that it started from one weekend and probably a larger percentage than maybe other audiences are familiar with what the Allied Media Conference is. We talked about it a little bit, but Daniel, in many ways, really put me onto this space as this like oasis of liberatory convening, and every type of creative medium is being engaged towards this new world-making. It's not just like, "Let's talk about organizing," it's really about we going to make a new world. It feels like euphoria and utopia to us as outsiders coming in, but with everything, there's contradiction.
The fact, and we as people who have connection to Allied Media projects and AMC, we were aware of these heightened tensions and didn't realize that this was the seating of the Detroit Safety Team and the fact that, yes, it's great for everybody in the country to be together at one place, but as people whose place this is, it actually drains a lot of our capacity to take care of our space and take care of our place. The fact that, one, those type of tensions and contradictions were arising, it brought me back to when Minneapolis was really kicking off. There was this dual thread of this global moment that's happening, but then also after a while I started hearing from folks on the ground like, "Hey, don't come here.
Stay where you are, do your thing." The fact that this work and then taking care of throughout the city or beyond the conference came from this recognition of like, "We're putting all this energy for this moment which does not allow us to fully invest into our people in the way that we want to," and that came out of this.
Daniel: Yes, and like you said, as the people have gotten to experience that space and that conference, it is a really remarkable space. I really encourage listeners to find ways to plug in. What they're doing this year is actually really interesting. It's a hybrid model of in-person and online, and if you're not in Detroit or connected to Detroit I think, they're basically asking you, again, don't come, engage with this in online, find ways to do work in your space.
That's another experiment that I'd love to talk more about on a future episode, but it was really cool to see the challenges and the potentials of coming out of a space where everyone is basically consenting to certain values, and then how do you build that collective consent moving that into different neighborhoods and different pockets of the city? I also thought in that consent building, one of the things that was so interesting to me was their self-evaluation work.
They take a step back, talk to the people that they're working with, that they're building with, and just really get very honest feedback and response on what's working and what's not, and then they address it and they change how they do what they do, which feels so basic, but is so rare. Everyone says, "Of course, I welcome feedback," and almost nobody welcomes feedback.
Damon: All right, I'm going to really go back to what I was thinking about during high school science class and talk about basketball. All during science class, I was just wondering like, "Do I have a game later?" and if I could be able to score 24 points.
Daniel: I hear you.
Damon: The clunky analogy that I'm feeling is when you talk about great athletes, we think about all of the razzle-dazzle, but the best ones are best at footwork and it really starts like being grounded. That's what I think about when I hear this practice of evaluation. We talk about abolition not being a destructive tendency, but one of creation and generation.
I think what it is generating is new information and information that other spaces and other institutions aren't even equipped to access or disseminate.
Daniel: Or gather.
Damon: Or gather. I think all quality organizing or valuable organizing is producing and analyzing and reproducing information in ways that we overlook because that's what it's all about. It's learning how to be new humans and we need to have data to come back to the science to be able to evaluate. I really appreciated how they emphasized that it was about creating the space for that communal agency to be able to evaluate what is going on in their circles and spheres.
Daniel: Damon, it reminds me of something that you said on some other podcast many moons ago. So much of what is needed in media work, and I think about this in our work, but I think it works for other organizing as well is moving things from knowledge to information. What are the things that people already know are needed in their community, what are the things that people are already doing to take care of each other that everyone knows like, "Oh, yes, on Tuesdays, we give out food," or, "My neighbor needed help jump-starting their car so they could get to work, so they knew they could knock on my door and I would do that."
Then how do you move that from the knowledge that people have into information that is then able to be used to push toward political change?
Damon: To that point, I believe very strongly that the abolitionist movement is a revolutionary struggle. When you're talking about revolution, you're talking about transforming society at a larger level, and usually, we only think about social movements in terms of revolution, but even if they weren't positive, some of the most impactful shifts are more structural. We think of the Industrial Revolution as changing the society in a way in which it cannot be reversed. I think right now, we are in an information age. We moved from an industrial age to an information age. That is the importance of how we imagined the factory floor, that mid-20th century like what the idea of the factory was.
I think information is actually the world-changing infrastructure right now. We need to not be passive about that or not just seed that space to government and corporations or stay power at large. In the same way we need the union organizing and we needed a grassroots relationship to labor and capital, I think we need a grassroots relationship to information to create new systems. I have one thing that I think we can all do to close out. We're at an unofficial midpoint or we're at a touchstone where we're evaluating and just had this rich conversation with Detroit Safety Team.
They are really aligned with what this podcast is talking about of experimenting, redefining, challenging notions of safety. Maybe after hearing this and all of our conversations, do we want to offer our understandings of how we're thinking about this concept of safety right now relative to the convo?
Daniel: Sure, but you got to go first.
Damon: I got go first? I was so ready to go last. I thought the asking--
Eva: [laughs]
Daniel: Fine, you can go last. fine.
Damon: I can go first.
Daniel: No, that's fine. One thing Detroit Safety Team said, this safety as process, I really liked, and the difference in different spaces because I think that takes away some of the ideological fight of it. The truth is is because people have different political ideologies, if we have people define safety for themselves in different communities, it's going to get really messy and people are going to define it as things that we don't agree with. I don't know exactly what we do with that, that's where the political transformation work goes in.
I don't know, I could see, this is more specifically about this episode, I could see Curtis' hesitation with capital D Democracy in this moment as like we just need everyone to decide for themselves and their community. Some of the contradiction of that, of like, well, in the state we're in, a lot of people will choose punitive responses, so that complicates my thinking, I think, in a good way of this type of work is important because without that, if you give people the illusion of choice between what they've always known and something that they don't trust or understand, they're going to choose the thing that they've always known even if it's a bad choice.
That's not a definition, but it's something that jumped out to me and has been emerging through these conversations is the way you get to a better future is by getting more people to be in practice so that they can learn for themselves and have these moments of transformation. It's not going to come from pamphlets. Thought, pamphlets, shout out to a pamphlet.
Eva: Thanks. Yes, I was going to say shout out to pamphlets.
Daniel: That was a direct shot at Eva.
[laughter]
Eva: I love that. I'm going to be squirrely because I didn't study for this exam, although maybe I've been studying for this exam my whole life, I don't know. It's a little bit cheating, but I'm going to say what safety is not. That's a great place for people to start. For me, my journey into transformative justice, into abolition was recognizing that safety is not putting people in cages, that we cannot punish others to create safety for ourselves. That's a pretty simple thing, but it's a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people out there. On the flip side of that, what is safety?
Again, I'm going to be squirrely but say safety is when we have equitable opportunities to be healthy, to experience joy, to have opportunities in our communities. I think that this is really at the bottom of what we, as abolitionists, are trying to build is a world in which we are not free from harm from each other, but how do we work towards a place where harm is prevented, where harm is minimized, and when there is harm that we move forward together to address violence, address conflict, address insecurity in a way that moves, not just one class or one person forward but all of us together.
Damon: I really appreciate that and those two things resonate, how do we move past these abstractions towards, one, addressing the harm. Kiss, your takeaway definitely really resonated with me as well.
Daniel: Even though I didn't answer the question?
Damon: No, the takeaway of your learning of redefining safety as a process as opposed to a state of existence or an outcome. I want to li a little bit more coherent in how I've struggled with safety because I didn't want to subvert what they were naming or their work too much with ideological musings. Kind of like I named, the interrogation started with the campaign line more or less that police and keep us safe. The world for the last eight years has been at the forefront of so much of the work.
I named these cliche mainstream ways of the way in which we talk about safe neighborhoods or you'll talk about a safe school, which then is differentiating and redistributing risk and harm and violence to marginalized and oppressed people is usually what I hear from that. Then also I want to talk about the way in which I feel movement internalize the safety fallacy and showed up. It goes, again, to one of my old idioms is we have to be able to accept that which even we can't tolerate. To me, it's an acceptance of our reality.
There were some times in movement space, I remember once distinctly the day that the Laquan McDonald video was released and this mass emergent direct action turning towards rebellious activity was being stewarded by our ecosystem. It got to a point where it went from a marching protest to the police are now attacking and targeting and arresting organizers violently. A person that I rock with was yelling at people at a really heightened state and just saying, "I'm trying to keep people safe," and was showing up in a way that was actually counter to the type of response or grounded or poise that we need and just the realization of we are not safe right now.
It didn't come from a theoretical thing, it came from someone saying it in real-time and looking around and saying, "This is not true and that ideal is not possible right now, but there is so much that we can do." We can protect ourselves, we can readjust, we can strategize, we can end this and disperse and leave, but trying to control this situation and remove all of the risks that is present, particularly in that situation where we chose to be there, it felt like a conundrum that we were in. Then in the months after that, I started seeing in actual meeting space, the language of safety be used to subvert principled struggle.
In times where there was generative conflict or difficult conflict that we might not have been able to generate much out of, but there was structural and political importance, I saw folks, and particularly when it's folks in power, say, "I don't feel safe right now," and the dialogue stopped, the struggle stopped. That was then the end of the really important tension that we needed to be working through. I saw that that was happening in succession. Within a few weeks, really important conversations were diverted under this guise of this isn't safe.
As that was happening at the same time back to the structure, recognizing we're doing weekly actions or monthly actions on our police headquarters here in Chicago and the sign doesn't say the Chicago Police Headquarters, it says the Public Safety Headquarters. Our military is not investing in billions of dollars of occupying the planet. It's not called the colonial office, it's not called the military department, it's called national security is the language under which we invest into violence and invest into disrupting human connection and I think actually creating unsafety.
As all of that was swirling in my young organizer activist brain, then looking at the definition of the absence of threat or risk, it just felt clear to me that I think we could maybe even move further if we stop investing into that ideal. The way that they're redefining it and talking about it as process is very much in alignment with what I'm saying. It's still using the word and I think I try very hard to not be a word stickler, even though I'm a word nerd.
Daniel: There's a fine line.
Damon: There's a fine line between nerd and stickler.
Eva: There he goes again.
Damon: I get a little sensitive now. I think it was easier at first to be like, "Stop saying safety" or being annoyed at us using the word and making it more grounded, but the reflection came true to me when the university space became really contested. My memory is like 2018 or maybe even 2017, where I started seeing a lot of action on campuses, on university presidents around sexual violence policies, around diversity issues, around worker justice on campuses, and then folks would use direct actions on established institutional power.
Then the way that they would subvert engaging with the student's demands was saying, "Your direct action makes me and my staff not feel safe, and so therefore your demands are invalid." That's obviously not said in good faith, but if we uphold in our own spaces that we have to have this absence of risk instead of creating structures to protect from harm or to, when it happens, address it and move through it and collectively evaluate, I feel like we move actually away from health and health is a thing that you can measure. Wellness is a thing that you can measure, protection is something you can actually do.
You can lock a door, you can close a window with the understanding that even those protections can still be subverted and that there's always a responsive orientation to the world that we have to have. That feels like a lot, but I just wanted to say that l think actually, part of how we get to a world without police and prisons is people on a collective political level not expecting safety. That's a relational social thing, and so that's why I love it as a process. With your pod of three to four people, with your four-block radius, you can then have feeling comfortable or not feeling danger, but particularly in a society dominated by racial capitalism, carceral militarism, and cis-heteropatriarchy.
We live in violence. Accepting and responding to that reality and creating new ones as opposed to, "I can't engage the world unless I'm safe" has been a thing that I have. My last caveat is I say that with a privileged body. I don't want to discount the real risk and danger that people have to deal with that I do not on a daily basis and I'm not trying to say that the notion of safety internally or on your body is not a real thing. That's that.
Eva: I think it's another rule, six episodes deep that we have to bring Mariame into it. Sorry, Mariame.
[trombone playing]
Speaker: It's just true.
Eva: Mariame Kaba at this conference I was at said something that, of course, just breaks it right on down, which is that black feminists have taught us that safety isn't a thing, it's a social relation.
Damon: That was such a better way to say all that shit I was trying to say. Thank you, Mariame.
Daniel: From an editing standpoint, that's really helpful.
Damon: Jeez, Louise. There it is. That's what I was trying to say. [laughs]
Eva: You said it beautifully, it's just that she tweets it.
Damon: I got you, yes. It's that 280 character living. Her brain is really trained to give that retweetable--
Daniel: Concision.
Damon: Yes.
Eva: Look, when Mariame says, "Keep it moving," she means that we don't got time to lollygag around that's why she breaks it down for us.
Damon: Yes, stop with the paragraphs. [laughs]
Daniel: Speaking of keeping it moving, I think we should get on out of here.
Damon: Yes.
Eve: Woohoo.
Daniel Before we do we want to invite you to chime in on this peer review. What's jumping out from these conversations, what have you taken from our conversation with the Detroit Safety Team? Hit us up at millionexperiments@gmail.com, as well as on our socials with your thoughts with what's standing out to you from these conversations. Eve, where can they get in touch with the Million Experiments team?
Eva: As always, you can go to a millionexperiments.com or find us on social @interruptcrib.
Damon: We are at AirGo Radio, A-I-R-G-O radio everywhere. You can subscribe to our other podcasts AirGo, A-I-R-G-O, wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure that you rate, subscribe, review One Million Experiments. Share with a friend, share it with a new comrade, share it with your old science teacher. Just get everyone in the mix. We'll be back next month. Getting back in the lab with another experiment reshaping our world.
Damon: Much love to the people.
Daniel: Peace.