Shaun McMillan, educator and activist with Blueprint NC, gave testimony at the People’s Hearing on Wednesday, June 11 in Greensboro.
Good morning my name is Shaun McMillan. I use he, him pronouns and I am from Fayetteville, North Carolina.
I’d like to open with a few questions: What were you doing 5 years ago this summer during the largest ever global uprising for racial justice? Have models of community safety shifted significantly in your town or city to include the measures of transparency and accountability that we collectively demanded? Are we perhaps even LESS free than we were 5 years ago?
Unless we foment needed change, our communities will continue to bear the brunt of disparate policing and a system of mass incarceration.
New Vision and Infrastructure is needed for Community Safety. Much of this could be funded by the people’s budget through participatory budgeting and demanded annually by residents municipally. Offices of Community Safety (OCS) may be a viable vessel for developing this infrastructure. I appreciate the work that has been done particularly in Durham where the Holistic Empathetic Assistance Response Teams or HEART program has emerged as the GOLD STANDARD for a humane response to mental health crisis.
In moving forward we have to remember that Community Centered public infrastructure like the OCS here in Greensboro will have to be shaped by the people and not effectively neutralized by public officials. The need for persistent engagement has been clearly evidenced in my hometown of Fayetteville. In true performative fashion elected officials celebrated allocation of more than 2 million dollars for an Office of Community Safety but quietly removed any mention of Independent Oversight prior to launch.
A sad realization is that in Atlanta, Washington DC, and even in Fayetteville NC, the black leadership class (which effectively acts as a buffer class) is holding up systems that perpetuate mass incarceration and harm. In fact, since 2020, elected officials almost everywhere have doubled down on local tools of authoritarianism and increased funding for police. The fight to confront this challenge will be hyper-local and it’s on each one of us to build local power to impact the outcomes.
In the words of Dr. Ruha Benjamin:
“Black faces in high places are not going to save us. Just look at the Black proponents of Cop City in Atlanta’s leadership class. Just look at the Black woman’s hand — Ambassador at the UN — voting against a ceasefire in Gaza. That is, our Blackness and our womanness are not in themselves trustworthy if we allow ourselves to be conscripted into positions of power that maintain the oppressive status quo.”
This is so much bigger than the Community Safety policy.
We must build popular education models that clearly make connections between settler colonial violence, state oppression and the subjugation of black and brown communities locally, nationally and globally.
We must reject the passive acceptance of systems that criminalize the existence of poor and unhoused people.
We must reject passive acceptance of an infinitely extractive economic system that shows no sign of recognizing that this planet has limited resources.
We must reject passive acceptance of systems driven by morally bankrupt state terror that would ruthlessly target our immigrant neighbors and attempt to erase our trans kindred.
We must absolutely reject passive acceptance of systems that would unapologetically perpetrate a genocide of more than 50,000 people in plain sight of the entire world!
We must move forward with the understanding that unless we generate and find courage to organize and resist- these systems will be the destruction of us all.
I encourage all of us to stay grounded in that truth and take inspired action to right that which you know is wrong. This is exclusively a national fight- we must start at home in our local communities. Let’s continue to hold a revolutionary spirit of disruptive peace intertwined with imaginative ambition that is already in our DNA. A spirit nurtured by our movement elders and fed by us all. It will continue to spread.
Remember that courage invites courage. In the words of Sister Mariame Kaba: ‘We Do This Till We Free Us.’ All of us or none of us. Thank you.
