June 2, 2020
Joint Statement of Arkansas Public Policy Panel and Citizens First Congress In Response to the Murder of George Floyd And Subsequent Civil Rights Protests
We are sickened by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many other black community members at the hands of law enforcement. Our hearts and prayers go out to their families. These incidents are happening with devastating regularity in Arkansas and across the country. In far too many instances — even locally — perpetrators of excessive force and brutality are not held accountable. We call on state and federal authorities to prosecute careless officers to the fullest extent of the law, including those officers who stood by as Mr. Floyd’s life was extinguished.
A system without accountability is a system designed for injustice.
We are fed up and ready for genuine reform after so many instances that should have shocked our national consciousness. We can not wait until there is yet another senseless killing of a black person by police officers.
We need several specific police reforms right now, including:
Mandated citizen review committees in all jurisdictions that are strong, independent, and have authority, to add a layer of transparency and accountability to law enforcement.
A citizen review of police use of force policies and standardizing these policies across jurisdictions.
Increase the use of community policing and de-escalation tactics. We need to make sure law enforcement has the training, resources, and accountability to do this right.
End the reliance on military-style tactics, equipment, and training in law enforcement.
Cultural competency training and unconscious bias training for all law enforcement officers and members of the criminal justice system.
Accountability for police officers who use excessive force or participate in racial targeting. We need law enforcement to take responsibility for weeding out their bad actors instead of protecting them.
Create a national database of disciplinary actions taken against law enforcement officers, like there are for many other professions, so a police officer fired in one jurisdiction can’t simply move a few miles down the road and resume the same bad actions.
We call on Governor Asa Hutchinson to convene a Blue Ribbon Commission on Racial Equity that has broad participation from many segments of our society, and to put his political leadership into passing the recommendations of the Commission. We can not continue to ignore the problems and hope the situation improves.
We all need to be outraged. We stand in solidarity with so many diverse protestors across Arkansas who are coming together to say we are not going to take it anymore. These protests reflect the national pain of inequality ignored for generations across every system in America. There have been no serious attempts by our political leadership to address them.
These protests are not about one bad cop. Our police and justice systems have produced massive disparities for generations. Blacks specifically, and people of color more broadly, are heavily overrepresented in our jails, in our prisons, on death row, and targeted for regular traffic stops and stop-and-frisks. Our parents and grandparents protested these disparities generations ago, yet little has changed.
The disparities extend beyond the criminal justice system and touch every facet of American life.
The COVID crisis is exposing massive inequities in our health and social safety net systems. The life expectancy of an African American male in Arkansas is 10 years less than that of a white man. Black women in the United States have a pregnancy-related mortality rate three times that of white women. Yet our political leaders shrug.
Education funding is so inequitable that opportunities for students of color are more severely limited than our white peers, yet state policymakers create charter schools, voucher schemes, and budget gimmicks that make our system even more inequitable instead of better.
Our economic system produces a 2-to-1 racial inequity on income and a staggering 10-to-1 gap on wealth that includes assets like stocks and homeownership. Instead of investing in community development and creating ladders out of poverty, our policymakers have lavished massive tax breaks on the wealthiest while making the social safety net ever more punitive and the path to the middle class ever more treacherous.
These systematic disparities are the results of policy choices designed to produce the inequitable outcomes our community lives with today. Any attempt by community leaders to name and address these inequities has been met with massive resistance, demonization, big-money opposition, and further dehumanization of our community. It’s time to address our racialized inequity and violence towards black people and other people of color.
The frustration of fighting, still, for the same rights our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents fought for decades ago can not be underestimated. It is time for political, faith, business, and community leaders to place dismantling inequity and systemic racism in the center of all of their agendas. If you are not specifically seeking justice, then you are willfully participating in continuing injustice. Now is not the time to be silent or passive.
While everyone should be shocked into action, we ask our allies to remember that unless you are black, you do not feel the fear and frustration that those of us who are black feel. Unless you are a person of color, then you can not know what it’s like to be a person of color in our society. We need our white allies to support those of us who live these injustices to see them resolved. We need black voices and leadership to guide the path forward on the reforms demanded by this moment, and we need the support of our whole community to heal and move forward together.
Peaceful protests must be respected and honored. We encourage community members to continue nonviolent protests until we see action. We encourage communities to protest in open, well-lit areas, to have medical volunteers on hand, to have volunteers monitoring and helping keep the peace, and to document their protests with video so that incidents of violence can be prevented. We understand why parts of our community are so frustrated, and police should respond to protests with de-escalation instead of militarized tactics. Large crowds of peaceful protestors should never be fired on with tear gas and rubber bullets.
We are committed to supporting the organizers and activists on the front lines of this movement. We will support the leaders emerging from this moment to run for school board, county quorum court, city council, prosecuting attorney, and the legislature. We need a broad range of sustained activism and organizing, from protests to election strategies and policy campaigns. We hope everyone will make sure they complete the Census, register to vote, and stay engaged when lawmakers convene to debate the very policies we are protesting. We need to make sure we build a movement that is enduring so we can hold lawmakers accountable for delivering on promises to make our systems more equitable.
George Floyd will never again get to cast a vote to hold a politician accountable. We stand with our brothers and sisters to act now before we are asked to bear witness to another recording of another black American begging for their life with “I can’t breathe.”