A Call to the Second National Conference of NAARPR
We issue this Call to our second National Conference following our re-founding national conference in 2019. We issue this Call with a new sense of urgency, and a new understanding born in the crucible of the great rebellion of 2020 demanding justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and all the victims/survivors of police crimes then and now. Our National Alliance re-founded in November 2019, just six months before the murder of George Floyd. We were ready, willing and able to participate and mobilize hundreds of thousands of people during the great rebellion. As a result of the great rebellion, we were endowed by the people with financial and people resources that increased our capacity to organize tenfold. Riding on the crest of the rebellion we have morphed into a mass movement (demanding community control of the police) to bereckoned with nationally and locally.
The Alliance and its branches were able to free some of the wrongly incarcerated after decades in prison. We worked to free activists arrested during the rebellion and other protests and continued our work to support political prisoners. In Chicago the National Alliance branch has become the cutting edge of a mass movement for civilian oversight that gives us a pathway to community control of the police. Alliance branches and affiliates from Minneapolis/Saint Paul in Minnesota to Dallas, Texas, and from Los Angeles, California to Jacksonville, Florida are building mass movements for community control. While we are building and growing in our ability to defend our movement the forces of racist and political repression have also been growing at an alarming rate. Since the 2020 rebellion we have seen the storming of the Capitol by an organized mob of white supremacists and avowed fascists, we are presently witnessing Congress reneging on passing the George Floyd and Voting Rights bills, we have witnessed a spike in police killing Black and Latino people with impunity, we have seen an unprecedented wave of repressive legislation designed to suppress the right to vote of Black, Brown and poor people.
The pandemic still sweeping the land continues to wreak economic havoc, disproportionately kill Black people and create conditions that spawn violence in our communities. Consequently, it is becoming clear to growing masses of people that police do not keep us safe and that what is needed is not more police but more community control of the police. At the same time Alliance branches and affiliates have worked hard to oppose increases in police budgets and to support efforts to divert police funding to meet social needs and to demilitarize the police. If ever there was a time to defend and extend the democratic rights of the people to organize and protest that time is now and that is precisely why we need to call for and build this National Conference. We must use this conference to home in and focus on organizing ourselves to meet all the challenges we face in this moment. We are reaching out to all strands of the peoples’ movement to join us in this endeavor.
JOIN US
