Episode 66: Ryan Henyard and Paul Fleming on the Coalition for Reenvisioning Our Safety


Today we talk (and dream a little) with members of the Coalition for Reenvisioning Our Safety.

Paul is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and helps to organize the Michigan Chapter of Public Health Awakened. He spends his time thinking about, researching, teaching, and organizing around root causes of health inequities, including policing and immigration policies. You can find him on Twitter.

Ryan is an educator, activist, DEI consultant, artist, and community catalyst. He is a trustee for Avalon Housing, an alum of the Nonprofit Enterprise at Work’s Champions for Change leadership program, and a founding member of CROS. You can find him on Twitter, Instagram, and his website.

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Come check out our episodes and transcripts at our website, annarboraf.com, and keep the conversation going on Twitter and Facebook.

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Transcript

Molly (00:13):
So this is our last election update before the election. All we have to say really is, if you haven’t voted yet, get on it. Please. If you’re listening to Ann Arbor in line, stay in line. If you’re planning to vote at the polls, remember to leave your campaign gear at home. One of us got burned by this in a recent election. And that’s pretty much all we’ve got to say. Just a few days left. Keep breathing everyone.
Jess (00:42):
We’re almost there. Vote yes on all the proposals. Go all the way down the ballot. Be that
Molly (00:48):
Guy only. Good shit on the ballot
Jess (00:49):
Only. Good shit on the ballot this time, . All right, speaking of good shit. Today we are talking to Ryan, he and Paul Fleming about envisioning community safety beyond policing. Paul is an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. He helps to organize the Michigan Chapter of Public Health, awakened a group of public health folks organizing for health, equity and justice throughout the state. He spends his time thinking about researching, teaching, and organizing around root causes of health inequities, including policing and immigration policies. He’s currently working on a book about the surprising costs of our current public policies and a vision for transitioning to a society based on care and preventing harms. You can find him on Twitter at Fleming. Paul J. Ryan is an educator, activist, DEI consultant, artist and Community Catalyst. He’s a trustee for Avalon Housing, a nonprofit focused on permanent supportive housing in Washtenaw, an alum of the nonprofit enterprise at Works Champions for Change Leadership Program, and a founding member of Crows By Day.
(02:00):
He addresses as a director of education and Faculty initiatives at the Association of American Medical Colleges, but spends his remaining time infusing activism, curiosity, care, and joy in all of his work, from police brutality to wildlife photography and loves nerding out about social justice. You can find him on Twitter at K u r o g a n E. Sorry, Ryan, I forgot to ask you how to pronounce that on Instagram at K U R O G A N E I G, or at his website, atard.com. And of course, will link all of that in the show notes both of our guests use. He, him pronouns, Ryan and Paul, welcome. I was so dancey about today’s conversation, I can’t even tell you. So I read your official bios, and thank you for that, and you’re amazing. But before we dive all the way into the conversation about what Crows is, could I ask each of you to tell us a little bit about and how you came to be doing this work? And Ryan, I’ll look at you first.
Ryan (03:04):
Sure. Thanks Jess. I’m a long time listener. First time caller, . I am a Detroit native. I was born and raised in the city of Detroit, you know, Detroit Public Schools grad. And had a lot of, you know, difficult encounters with policing growing up to the point where, you know, it was something that was really critical to my upbringing and to my own identity formation, and something that I expected to just have to kind of live with all my life for the past 15 years. And sorry, lemme start over. For the past 15 years before my current post, I worked at the University of Michigan, and one of the last projects that I was extremely proud of in my time there was building a Teachout in the summer of 2020 on the history of police brutality in the United States.
(03:52):
I did that work along with a lot of colleagues and and professors who got on to build a learning experience that was entirely new, had never been really created on this scale before. That dived into all sorts of different aspects of policing and police brutality, because when I found myself looking at the aftermath of the George Floyd Rebellion and seeing all the people in the streets and knowing that I couldn’t do all the things that I wanted to do in that moment as an educator looked up and said, Well, I can find a way to teach with this. So, you know, we put together this course really loved working on it. It totally changed my willingness to openly talk about my political views around policing and public safety. And then that work snowballed into meeting a lot of really amazing community members, a lot of different activists and organizers and non-profits. And I’ve really tried to just keep that momentum going and move from just educating about the issue to finding a way to actually do something about it. I ended up getting involved with Crows in our early pro state just as a group of people coming together trying to figure out how to help trying to figure out how to put a focus on unarmed responses to crises. And everything else from there is just kind of been magic.
Molly (05:22):
Yeah. Thank you, Ryan. How about you, Paul?
Paul (05:26):
Yeah, well, thanks for having me on. It’s great to be here and for me you know, my trajectory into this work. I grew up in a suburb of, of Chicago. I’m a white cisgender man, so I am not targeted by police. I am not the recipient of some of some of the harms that we’ll talk about later in the show. So, so part of how I came to this work is you know, I work in the field of public health. My focus area. I study inequities. So the ways that different groups experience different health outcomes. In the US context, we have, we see these stark racial health inequities where black Americans, Latinx Americans have worse health outcomes than white Americans, right? And so part of my work is working within communities to really address what are the root causes of, of these inequities.
(06:23):
And the more I did did some of that work, you start to see the ways in which our government policies, things like how police interact how police operate in communities, is one of those root causes. I also credit a lot of folks within the public health field who are not me that really push this this framing that the way we do policing in the us in the us and other countries, but the way we do policing is really harmful for communities, and it is in fact a public health issue. So I credit folks like Dr. Rachel Hardiman William Lopez, Rea Boy, those are folks who really drove the conversation so that there was broader recognition within the field of public health that policing was in fact a public health crisis. So as I was doing my work in communities and seeing some of these things, there were other folks who were really driving that conversation, and I started to really join with them in some cases do work alongside them to really first off examine well, how, how is policing harming health harming communities?
(07:34):
But then also, what do we do about it? What are what are some of the solutions? How can we come together as a community to reduce this police violence and also really put something into our communities that is positive, that is helpful that is, that is helping to improve people’s health. So that’s how I come at the work. Like, like Ryan mentioned, when we were just getting started with Crows we all kind of came together with these different perspectives. I had been writing about and doing a little bit of, of work related to policing as a public health issue for a few years. And so I came into the conversation with that lens really complimented by, by other folks with a bunch of different lenses.
Molly (08:17):
Thank you both. And I will say that I think the show notes for this episode are probably going to be epic. We will throw in links to many of the people that we’re talking about today and the resources so that folks who wanna dig in and start learning more about this can have a nice little mini syllabus in the show notes. I also will say that I am wearing two hats today. I am obviously the co-host of this podcast, and I was also, I’ve been a member of Crow’s since the Start. Crow’s is the coalition for Reenvisioning our safety. We’ll talk more about that coalition bit, I think, in a, in a little while. But the, how I came to Crows was as a representative of another organization that I was a part of. Then the Arc Jewish Action of Greater Ann Arbor because that first meeting was really about bringing together this coalition of lots of different people.
(09:07):
And so for me coming to this work, it was shaped by past advocacy I’ve done around specifically immigrant rights but also for me really closely tied to my Jewish identity and the, the role that I see and the responsibility that I feel I have to be working against the kinds of injustices that policing tends to perpetrate in this country. And of course when you look at Jewish history, it’s a history of struggles against authority and struggles, struggles against state authority and struggles against police. And so it’s something that just resonated for me in terms of like, the stories I grew up hearing from relatives. I don’t have direct experience with harms from policing but I feel like I’ve inherited a little bit of a legacy. So that’s
Jess (09:58):
Business. Reminding me. Just real quickly, this is reminding me of something that Molly taught me about a year ago, a concept called positionality, which may be less mysterious to our academic friends and maybe more mysterious to people like me, which is locating your relationship to your work. And I think it gets really easy to kind of intellectualize, Oh, I work on this because, you know, it naturally extended from my dissertation if, if that’s your particular river that you swim in, or, you know, the work project that I did or whatever. But like, locating your identity within the work that you do is actually a really powerful way of relating to it. So I just wanted to call out the three of you for kind of locating yourselves within your work, and Molly, especially for teaching me about that concept because it’s been really powerful for me in how, not just how I talk about my advocacy, but how I engage in it. So thanks.
Molly (10:46):
All right. So diving in Crows Coalition for re-envisioning our safety. Ryan, can you just tell us a little bit about what Crows is?
Ryan (10:58):
Sure thing. So, Crows or the coalition for envisioning our safety is a group of really awesome community activists that has span, have role spanning across a number of different places in the community. It’s a group of folks who are brought together in the wake of the city of Ann Arbor, passing a resolution to pursue or explore a potential unarmed response program. And a lot of folks who work in different areas of focus for sorry, start over. For people who work in different areas of focus around the topic being able to reach out to each other and say, Do you know what’s going on with this resolution? Do you know how the city is actually going to approach it? Do you know what the things are involved in the scope, or how likely this is to actually happen?
(11:55):
And a lot of different side conversations got together, and by the time we all came together sometime in what, April of 2021, we ended up with a group of folks spanning from folks like Molly, from from Bendy art, Jewish accent clergy from a number of different congregations in the, in the city of Ann Arbor in the county. Educators like Paul and myself and others as well as folks working in housing, my colleagues at Avalon and it, who have already been committed to all the different pieces of the work of providing the sort of social safety net of care in the area. And we all got together to figure out whether or not this was something that was actually feasible, how far we could actually push, and whether we could do something together instead of all just doing work in our individual spaces.
(12:56):
Because I think everyone on those initial calls had some sort of tie to the work already. You were already involved in homelessness alleviation, or you might be already involved in helping people who use drugs and making sure that people are able to to be safe. You might already be involved in public health or, you know, in ministry or in just community engagement or working with youth. We have everything from, from ministers to midwives and , and it’s a really wonderful, amazing, multiracial, multi-generational group of people. It came together and we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how we wanted to approach what the city was trying to do, and decided that instead of just joining another task force or being on another committee, not that there’s anything wrong with with committees as long as they’re doing the work we formed this coalition to explore, to learn about all the different things going on in unarmed response to study what was going on in other cities where they tried this. And then to put together proposal and a plan and put that forth for our community to say, Hey, we are the folks in community who have this expertise. We have lived experiences, we have academic expertise, we have community knowledge, and here’s what we would like to see in terms of actually providing safety to community rather than just more policing.
Molly (14:27):
Thank you. That’s, that’s I think, a great overview of Crows, and I’ll just zoom out to give a a little bit of context. Some of our listeners might remember when the city of Ann Arbor passed a resolution saying, The city of Ann Arbor is going to create an unarmed crisis response program. And it was pretty high level resolution. It came out without a lot of, or any really community engagement in advance of the resolution. And it was, it was the existence of that resolution that the formation of Crows was really responding to. It was like, Oh, Ann Arbor has said they’re gonna do this. We, we need to make sure they are doing it the way we want them to and that they’re getting a broad spectrum of community input. So Paul, maybe you can tell us a little bit about what, what unarmed crisis response is, what we mean when we talk about unarmed response. Both, you know, what we’re looking at in other, what it’s like in other places.
Paul (15:25):
Yeah, absolutely. And I, and I think that’s, that’s part of it too, is that it actually looks very different in different places, and there’s not, there’s not a lot of clarity or there’s not one unified definition. And so it is important that we, we talk about you know, what crows means, or at least what Crows wants in terms of arm response versus how some other folks define it. And that’s really part of why Crows came together, is we knew that the city was wanting a version of unarmed response, but that could look a lot of different ways. And so, I mean, at its, at its basic level, an unarmed response program is that you are sending people who do not have guns to respond to crisis situations or emergency situations. So that can look anywhere from, you know, there’s, there’s an issue related to somebody who needs assistance or somebody who there’s a neighbor neighborhood dispute and they need somebody to come in and, and help them resolve it.
(16:31):
And, and honestly, you know, we could think about almost anything that police currently respond to. There could be a version of unarmed response that responds to that. Currently police are responding to a lot of instances where maybe a store owner is calling the police to help with public disturbance in front of their storefront, for example. So that’s another, another example. So the, the Crows Group really thinks expansively about what unarmed crisis response could respond to. And in fact, we think that there’s a really really broad scope of types of, of issues or crises that could, they could respond to, including mental health and other issues.
Jess (17:14):
I was surprised I had an opportunity to listen to Britney Pat Cunningham’s podcast undistracted, the episode that she did with Derek Pernell a few weeks ago called On Living and Loving Outside the Police State. And one of the statistics that they quoted is, I don’t remember which study or which community this was for, but of all of the calls that were placed to 9 1 1 90 6% had nothing to do with police. It was people needing information, people needing kind of low grade community help people needing, you know, to be directed to one department or another. And it just got me thinking like, 96%, we don’t need 9 1 1 as a police number, we need 9 1 1 as a, can you help me find my human that I need to talk to number? Which sounds a little bit like what you’re talking about, Paul.
Paul (18:04):
Yeah. And, and when, when there have been cities that have piloted these types of programs, you know, what they often find is that there’s a, you know, in some cases, over half of all 9 1 1 calls can easily be diverted to a crisis response, You know, and I think our group, you know, thinks that number could be even higher than that, but just at kind of a basic level, you put some, some people to, like in a, that are non-police as responders, it kind of, in that first year, it’s really easy to divert a bunch of the calls to them instead of having police who have guns and have the authority to arrest and imprison folks, be the ones that respond. So that says a little bit about unarmed crisis response. And we can probably give some examples of, of where it’s existed in other places too, if that’d be helpful.
Molly (18:54):
Yeah. But let’s, Ryan, it sounds like you want, you had something to, to jump in
Ryan (18:58):
With. Yeah, I wanted to jump in and just add that, you know, we have all these things that we use 9 1 1 4 and there’s a part of on our response that is about that of, you know, disaggregating a lot of the, the requests for help and to containers, where are PE containers or triage where the people who are actually best best positioned to help actually are. And a lot of times that’s not police the majority of the time, that’s not police. But I think there’s also an element of this that is resonant for me, which is that people are afraid to call for help for a lot of different things because of the fact that it comes with an armed response. I don’t wish violence upon myself, but if I were accosted in, you know, in a violent incident, I wouldn’t call 9 1 1.
(19:46):
And a lot of people say this a lot of people challenge that assertion, but I’ve lived that experience where, you know, I’ve been robbed and have decided that it is better for my safety to not call the emergency response line, because it is more likely that I will be harmed from that interaction than made whole. And so part of what we’re looking to do is to make someplace that is safe for everyone to call, because everyone deserves to have someone to reach out to for safety. And everyone deserves to have some kind of way to help make themselves safe and whole. We know that sending pokes with guns in, for people who are neuro, sorry, we know that sending people with guns for folks who are neuro divergent and for people with mental or behavioral health challenges is one of the highest indicators of potential police violence. We know that for folks who are survivors of sexual assault and sexual misconduct, that there is a lot of stigma and fear and potential retaliation that comes from calling, you know, calling a Carceral 9 1 1 response. There’s so many situations where the fact of who is responding to calls and what happens with that with, with that call where that information goes, you know, what the potential outcomes are prevents people from getting help for things. And when they don’t get help for things, then life just gets harder.
Paul (21:20):
Yeah, I, I, I’m glad you mentioned that, Ryan. And it’s really, you know, for us about connecting the right resource with the, the right situation. And, and right now in so many cities and communities across the US police are the only resource that are available to folks to call. And, and we know from both research lived experience and other things that there are often way better people to be able to assist in, in different situations. And part of that is because of the trust that Ryan was talking about, is that a lot of people have been you know, harmed by police harmed by responders, and so responding with folks that community members trust that maybe are their neighbors, their, you know, trusted other folks that’s really the right resource in that situation. It’s somebody that, that person who is in crisis can trust as opposed to sending somebody that evokes fear or could potentially cause harm that’s gonna exacerbate the situation. So it’s, I think, a really important, important thing to kind of rethink, re-envision who is the right person in these situations. And so often it is not, is not the police.
Jess (22:35):
You know, I’ve been meditating on the things that you guys are saying now and the work that you’ve done for the last year and a half. I’m sitting here, Molly and I are part of a small group of a advocates and organizers, and we give each other advocate and organizer presence sometimes. And Molly, I have two of yours accidentally sitting right in front of me. One is my awesome AOC mug that on the back of it says, I am brave enough to do this. So I drink this from this in difficult conversations. And the other one is a book called, We Do This Book Til We Free Us by Miriam Kaba. And this book really kind of opened my eyes to both the harms of policing and what we can envision beyond it, and helped me start to see my own story within it as an advocate and an activist, I kind of traverse the spectrum between statistics and stories, deciding, you know, what am I, what are my tools in this particular moment?
(23:29):
And I’m very careful about how I bring my own story into the work that I do. But something that I really started meditating on, and Paul and Ryan, the things that you’re saying both made me think of is that my first sexual assault experiences were as a minor and reporting them to the authorities for me first meant therapist and teacher. And it never actually escalated to police. And in retrospect, I don’t know why or if that would even have done anything, You know? And so as you’re talking about Care Beyond Policing, I actually find myself very naturally inclined towards it because that was exp my experience. And I, I know in conversations like this, people often point to violence and domestic violence and intimate violence as a reason for policing. And I’ve never found that compelling. And it wasn’t until I examined my own story that I realized why police have been completely absent from my experience, even when there was violence, even when there was trauma. And I found care and healing outside of that, even before there, even outside, I won’t say before, but even outside of language and kind of intentionality behind that. So that is a little bit of my positionality within what we’re talking about.
Molly (24:47):
Thank you, Jess, and thank you for sharing that with us. I, I think a lot of people have experiences of care without that, that didn’t involve police and of, of getting their needs met that didn’t involve police. One of the lines that I bring up a lot in a lot of the different spaces I work in is that safe communities are well-resourced communities, and safety comes from resources. It doesn’t come from police. And police in many situations are the ones bringing the danger and bringing the harm, and that, that’s often the experience of the people living in a place. That’s not to say it’s universal. There are certainly communities where there’s a lot of violence, and those communities are asking for more police and more surveillance. And that’s something that I’m really sensitive to. And I think Crows, like members of Crows have been sensitive to that as well. This idea that it’s not it’s, it’s what we’re working towards is not necessarily about police at all. It’s about creating something that starts from, from a different place.
Jess (25:58):
Which, which kind of leads me to my next questions, which is generally what, what will Crows offer or what will the Unarmed Crisis Response program, what will it offer? Maybe that, that’s the question that I wanna ask. What will this program offer and what is Crows doing right now to kind of help get us to that?
Ryan (26:19):
So answering this is more complicated than a lot of things, because in part the, I think we should also just highlight some of what has happened with Crows in the past year and a half. So after a year of really intense advocacy and lobbying all of our local electeds and talking with community members and holding forums and making posters and, you know, doodling with kids and all the fun stuff that comes from, you know, trying to share and expand our imaginations and ideas City of Ann Arbor did decide to allocate three and a half million dollars of American Rescue Plan funding towards the development of an unarmed response program. That’s going to go through in RFP or request for proposals process, like a lot of other things. And I think that there’s also and so, and so because of that and knowing that there’s not a single non-profit in the area that can hold this kind of work alongside of their existing missions there’s an effort to create a new non-profit to respond to this potential call for proposals. So there are some of us who have split off and created a new nonprofit called Care-Based Safety, where we are looking to get funding and, and continue to explore models looking at other cities the STAR program in Denver you know, the, Oh, so Mark Paul, I’m forgetting the name of the Spokane program. Go ahead.
Paul (27:49):
Is it Cahoots?
Ryan (27:50):
Cahoots, Yes. Or, or the programs like Cahoots or Rep in Minneapolis where people are looking at dramatically different models for community safety and figuring out what’s gonna be right for Ann Arbor and doing a lot of community engagement and building there. On the advocacy side, Crows is still doing a lot of work to spread awareness to get folks to participate in community surveys and and, and community surveys and town halls, and make sure that people understand the kinds of problems we’re looking to solve and maybe even get excited about the kind of future we’re trying to build together.
Paul (28:30):
Yeah. And, and just to add to that, I think, you know, the Ryan’s exactly right that, exactly what it’ll look like in Ann Arbor is still de to be determined, because it needs to be community informed that the details need to be specified. But, you know, we did Crows as a group early on, did a lot of community engagement work and, and coming together as a coalition around what we wanted. And so there are some broad strokes things we can point to that, that we do want. And one of those things is, is complete separation from police. So we have seen across the country that there are some programs that are kind of labeled as unarmed response or crisis response programs, community response programs, but they’re very, they’re either within police departments themselves or very closely tied to police departments and they correspond with police.
(29:22):
Our group has been pretty clear you know, ever since we’ve done the community engagement and come together as a group clear that this new program in Ann Arbor very much should be completely separate from police. And so that also means that there’s a separate number that it can be reached from. So it doesn’t have to be dispatched from 9 1 1, but it can be reached directly, especially by residents who don’t trust 9 1 1, don’t trust going through those channels. And that it’s, it’s a service that’s available. You know, in, in right now we’re talking about Ann Arbor, but you know, our coalition’s vision is that it would be expansive throughout Washtenaw County. We’d, we’d of course, love to see this everywhere. But that separation from police is a really fundamental thing. And then one of the other things that we really think is fundamental is that there’s community ownership for this program. So that, that likely means that it exists outside of city government and is more so run by a non-profit that has close ties to the community is has community members and directly impacted folks involved in the leadership involved in operating the program. So that’s what we’re working towards and pushing towards. But of course, all the details are still still to be determined.
Jess (30:38):
So this kind of suggests the answer to what I hope is a quick question. So I, what I’m hearing is that Crows is listening both to the community, you know, desires, values, how we’re imagining things, but has also looked to similar programs, related programs around the country and communities around the country. I’m curious, have you looked at both programming and funding models and like the legal structures? It sounds like you have, and I just wanted to ask a little bit about that.
Ryan (31:10):
Sure. and this was actually one of the, one of the big sorry, I’m trying to think of the, the word I want. I think that thinking about the potential for funding models and organizational structures is one of the big decision points that we had as a coalition. There is a very clear, easier path, frankly, than what we took is to say, you know, Hey, have the city do the thing we like it to do. It’ll get 60% of the way complete, if, you know, and they might choose some of our, our principles, but they will handle all of the hard things and the money will always be there. Versus where we ended up as a coalition, which is deciding that we’re willing to make hard choices about what we are willing to endorse and do and what we, what we’re not.
(32:01):
The group came together to decide that even though we spent all this time advocating for and hoping for the possibility of large sustainable funding to pilot this program and get it off the ground, that we would still, you know, be really hesitant to, to, to have money that had strings attached that contraindicated our values. We spent a lot of time with with folks from sorry. We spent a lot of time with folks from our community thinking about what are our non-negotiables in those values that Paul was discussing about the community control, about independence from policing. And we know that there’s some lines that we just can’t cross. So we hope that, you know, the city of Ann Arbor’s process will allow us to openly go for that proposal without having to, you know, hold one hand behind our backs or not be able to serve community members the way that all of our research and community knowledge and lived experience tell us they need to be served.
(33:06):
If it doesn’t come that way, then we’ll look towards other possible sources of funding. But I think that this group is committed to building something that we can be proud of without having to worry about tearing it down later. Maria Thomas an organizer with interrupting criminalization and also a Crows member really imprinted that on me early in our time together. Don’t build something we’ll have to tear down later. And so we’ve really been focused on whatever program we create, being one that is designed for our community and is sustainable and doesn’t compromise some of the values that we all hold dear.
Jess (33:49):
So you allude in that story to something that I am intensely curious about. I had the opportunity earlier this year to read and then reread cuz I couldn’t get enough of it. Alicia Garza is the purpose of power. It just short version, everybody read it. My God, everybody read it. But she also delves really definitely into the, the complexity of what it means to build power in the service of making change, right? So within communities, across communities, across neighborhoods, across, i I don’t wanna say political parties, but definitely like ideological divisions, how are you finding commonalities and growing and building together? And I appreciate that helped me appreciate some of the challenges that I’ve had in my own work where I’m like, wait, but you know, in, in my mind, coalition has this kind of rosy glow where we all agree on something and we’re all pulling together, and sort of that’s true. And also there’s tensions. And so I’m curious, like, procedurally, how do you, how does Crows work through challenges within the group, Whether that’s group challenges, deciding on, you know, the structure of what this looks like on the other side of it, whatever decisions the group is confronted with, how do you meet those challenges?
Molly (35:05):
I’m gonna jump in on this one and then give Paul and Ryan a chance to think, because one, one piece that I think was true throughout was that we took our time and there were these moments when it felt like we were coming up against external deadlines where the city X or Y decision had to happen in the city. And so we had to be ready, but that we spent a lot of time on the front end getting to know each other, learning about what were, what were the values that we shared that we could establish as group values which helped us have that foundation when there became things where we were coming from different perspectives about it. Paul, when we were preparing for this, you, you talked about one of those tensions that I would be great to hear about, I think a little more now.
Paul (35:52):
Yeah, I mean, I think one of, one of the great things about our coalition, which we highlighted from the beginning is that we all come at it from different lenses, different positionalities as we discussed earlier in the show. But, but one of those ways in which, you know, there is diversity within the group is our connection to formal government or formal institutions. So there are some folks within the coalition that either work within government, work very closely with government, are closely connected, right? And I think I wanna be explicit too, that inherent in that there is some level of, of trust perhaps, right? That, that government can be a tool or a solution to, to solve an issue that we’re go, we’re trying to address. I think there’s, there’s other folks that have a different orientation with institutions and government that’ve been harmed in the past or, or they’ve been harmed by city institutions in the past, or they’ve been they’re distrustful for, for various good reasons.
(36:53):
And so I think within those, within our coalition, both of those both those sides are represented and I think we’ve had a lot of really productive and useful discussions with, with kind of everybody learning from each other about some of their own you know, really hearing each other. But there has been, you know, moments where it’s like, are we gonna pursue the, this strategy or this strategy? And, and, and I think depending on your orientation to some of these institutions we might have different perspectives about it. And so I think because of like what Molly said because we put in the time on the front end, we were able to successfully navigate those waters because we trusted each other and we had processes in place to have those, those kind of challenging discussions and really hear each other. But that, that is, that is kind of a tension, I think that has come up again and again throughout our process.
Molly (37:54):
Yeah, for sure. And Ryan, there was, there were some other pieces of this too that I wanted to hear from you about.
Ryan (38:03):
Yes. I, I think that we also, in addition to the, the values and ways of being that we developed that Paul talks about we worked with Indeed Mess Van Johnson over at the New Center lovely community member pretty much all around amazing human to develop those for the Crows group. But in addition to that, we had some specific tools for dealing with organizational conflict and recognizing that we could have and build containers to have some of the difficult discussions and to know that, you know, hey, we’re all coming to this from different directions. We also have different skill sets and expectations and having a willingness to have a bunch of those difficult discussions. I don’t think that organizing work is always sunny and coalitions are things that can be pretty messy by nature.
(39:01):
It’s just a lot of folks coming together from different spaces. But something that I’m extremely proud of is the ways in which we’ve listened and learned from each other and found ways to honor those experiences. So for those who’ve been harmed by some of the existing power structures, taking those and standing back and saying, Okay, well now that we know that we might have trouble trusting these entities, let’s do a power map. Let’s actually look and see who are the people that we need to engage in the community for things to go together. Alright, we need to get so and so on side if we want to get this supported, you know, at this other level, if we wanna avoid conflict here this is how we manage that and let’s all strategize together on doing that work. There’s a quote from Grace Lee Bogs legendary Detroit activist that sticks in my heart, which is that movements are not made by critical mass, but rather by critical connections. And by having that coalition, we are each other’s critical connections. We are the people who can provide insight to each other about areas that we just don’t have knowledge of or insight to. And being able to decide whether wish to play inside the confines of the existing power structures or whether we want to pressure from outside and community, being able to fluidly move between those two is something that I think we were able to do that was pretty special.
Molly (40:33):
Yeah. So that, this is something you, you talked about a little bit earlier, and I think you were getting to it here as well, but I wanted to just take a moment to think about and talk through the successes that Crows has already had. So we don’t have a program in place yet, but there have been a couple of key moments where Crows has really pulled out the win. And I think there are some, probably some powerful lessons in there for other kinds of lo local, like local, local advocacy. And I’d love to hear what you two have, have thought or taken away from some of these early successes.
Paul (41:11):
Yeah, I mean, I’ll, I’ll start, but of course Ryan jump in. You know, I think we, we from an early on all shared a value of community engagement and that what we were doing, but were, would be informed by the people who have been most impacted by police violence or, or the harms of policing. And so early on we were doing different community engagement efforts of talking, you know, and some of that was just basic talking to people we knew or people in our own networks, but also some, some more formal efforts or events. And we were able to build into sign-ons from a, a bunch of different organizations. I’m sure we can link to the Crow’s website, but take a look at all the different organizations that have signed on to the vision that that crows developed with community.
(42:05):
And I think that, you know, we’ll get to some of the more concrete successes like budget in a second, but this, the coming together of all these different organizations, that is a feat. And I think it, it speaks to the different groups that are represented in kind of our core group of the coalition and our networks and the trust that we were able to build early on. I think I’m really proud also of some of the community education we’ve done to really help folks rethink what public safety means and rethink what is the role of policing in our community. And, and, you know, and really imagine what, what alternatives we might be able to have. I think the very concrete successes we we really pushed for and we’re able to mobilize for ARPA funds to be dedicated to unarmed response. So 3.5 million. And, you know, part of that was our group trying to mobilize folks to really say to the city, This is what we want. We want funding dedicated for it. So those are some of the exciting wins that I, that come to mind for me. Ryan, how about you?
Ryan (43:12):
I, I think that I mean, 3.5 million is a lot. It’s a whole lot. And you often don’t get what you ask for in campaigns like these. And this is a case where we actually got the numbers we asked for itself a wildly impressive thing. There’s not many communities, if any, communities that I’ve seen that have managed to pull off that level of investment in the topic. And while we still haven’t completely driven at home and there’s still a lot of work to do and places for things to falter it’s really a staggering achievement when I stand back and look at it and makes me really shy thinking about it. But I, I also think that the thing that I’m most proud of in terms of success is that we managed to change the conversation around safety and make it something that was owned by all of the people in, in the community rather than an issue that’s only owned by people who, you know, wear a badge or, you know, or a uniform or sit on an oversight committee.
(44:15):
And getting everyone to think about and to really, really open their minds and imagine what life could be like and how their lives could be enriched and made safer by relying on each other is something that like I will forever be proud of. And something that strikes me as one of the things that felt the most impossible when we started to do this. Bringing this group of people together and doing all this work itself felt like a miracle. I, whether I expected us to be successful or not, I was mostly happy to just be spending time with fellow travelers and getting to work with people who thought about wanting to build a world together. There was based off of what we what we wanted to see and affirmative vision of the future, rather than just responding reactively to despair and gloom and all the other things that life kind of throws at us.
(45:10):
And so the fact that other people have come with us and that people have taken time out of their lives to go stand up at city council or to put up flyers or to, you know, design posters or, you know, leave voicemails, all the things that people have done is just kind of miraculous. And it’s something that gives me a lot of fuel to keep going for a lot of other work. And I hope that folks don’t look at this and go, well, they were destined to succeed because we absolutely were not . I, I, as optimistic as I sound, I think I’m a pessimist at heart and this, but this was work that felt like it was important to do even if we weren’t successful. So the fact that we were is even more astonishing.
Jess (45:53):
You referenced Gracely bogs earlier, and one of my favorite things that she said is that we have a right, actually a duty to shake the world with a new dream. And I love that. And it brings me into our last question, which I would actually like to pose to all of us. So crows is about reenvisioning or reimagining public safety. What does that mean to each of us? And I will propose that Paul, Molly, me, and Ryan kind of offer a reflection on that question.
Paul (46:29):
All right. Getting to go first on this wonderful, but also tricky question to answer a little bit. But I’m so glad we’re ending with imagination. That to me has been one of the most inspiring parts about this work is just really thinking we could have a different community, we could have a different city. The w the the, the way things work right now is, is not necessarily even by design. Some things happen by accident, some things are by design, but we can envision an entire entirely different way of doing things. So when I, when I think about re-envisioning public safety, I’m thinking about such, so much closer connections to my neighbors and that we, that there’s a, there’s a reliance and there’s a community. I think we’ve, you know, so much of our life or the, the community that we have built, it’s disconnected.
(47:27):
People go into their homes at the end of the day, they don’t talk to their neighbors. And for me, part of rein envisioning our safety I’m not even thinking about the police. I’m thinking about how we connect with each other and how we provide that support for each other. So yes, I want an unarmed crisis response that I can call to come in, in a time of need, but I also want to be able to call my neighbor and say, You know what? I just heard a funny sound in my in my house. Can you come help me out? I don’t need to call this agency. I don’t need to call this crisis. So when I think longer term about re-envisioning our safety, we are in such closer knit communities, and that is the most kind of important thing. And, and when I start envisioning that close knit community, there’s so many things that become possible. And so, so that just really makes me hopeful.
Molly (48:24):
I love that. I think I’m, I think I’m next and I’m gonna focus in on one piece of the vision that I think will surprise no one here and none of our listeners, which is that I think a lot about freedom of movement and what our streets look like and what our sidewalks look like, and what our shared public spaces look like when we are building for safety and for community. And I can tell you what, there’s not a lot of cars in that picture, but the thing is that cars and the way we talk about safety are so tied together and so many of the dangers that we face moving through our lives, it’s not about violent crime, it’s about violent cars. And so much of what people can’t imagine often when we talk about a life without police is they, they don’t understand how, how we would keep our streets safe, and it means building them differently and building our cities differently. But that’s a big chunk of my vision when I think about, when I reimagine our safety.
Jess (49:39):
I just kind of wanna take a bath in Paul and Molly’s imaginations. It’s just, ugh, I’m feeling so held by those. I’m, I’m meditating on another Miriam Kava quote, which is, she says, We all have to gain skills within our communities so that we can hold harm, transform it, and come out the other side. And one of the things that I have so appreciated about Crow’s approach and other community efforts is that it’s not necessarily a battering ram. It’s not this is what we want and we’ll do anything to get it. It is, it is about the process. And that’s why I wanted to ask you about dealing with conflict intention. Earlier, I was really interested in how a group, a coalition with an ambitious vision, deals with a necessarily necessarily conflict of transition and of change. And so I, I think my imagination for our community as that we are allowed to embrace, especially as Midwesterners, where it feels like we are allergic to it, and I am not even an actual Midwesterner, I’m a southerner, so I’m an adopted Midwesterner, and it’s worse. We feel like conflict is when we’re doing something wrong, when actually conflict is just that friction of change. And so my imagination is we are a community that can imagine a process that heals us as we go through it. And I think crows is just a lovely example of how we might be able to do that.
Ryan (51:23):
Ooh, I, I love that so much. And I think that you all are very hard to follow because I, I could see in my mind’s eye Molly’s large protected bike lane of love that is winding through this like tight knit neighborhood that Paul’s created. And, and I, I, you know, Jess, I really think about how we hold conflict and how we hold in how, how we negotiate these different things between each other. I think that we all have different needs and some of what I envision as a, a community that’s safe is one in which all of us can have our needs met without transgressing on each other. And, you know, I’m someone who’s disabled. For me, sometimes it’s being able to actually just get into the community spaces and to exist there in a, in a way that is comfortable and isn’t causing additional pain.
(52:25):
I would like to not have to think about what time of night it is that I decide to, you know, do a particular thing and to know that if I get sick, that you know that there’s a community of people who can help me. That there’s someone who will be able to take me to the hospital outside of my spouse someone who will, you know, that there are people to do all of these things. And, and for me, there’s, there’s two quotes that kind of stick in my heart for this that really guide me. One is there’s a button on my backpack. If you see me around town, I’ve got my camera and my big, my big obnoxious wildlife photographer, camera and backpack. And there’s a button that says Hope is a discipline from Marion Kaba.
(53:10):
And it’s, it’s there because the only thing on that backpack, because I look at it every single day, and I have to remind myself that hoping for this future and working towards it is being committed to being a link in the chain, to creating that safety for other people. And recognizing that there is love at the center of all the things that I’m doing. I am a gigantic fan of e viewing Dr. E viewing, who’s a sociologist of race education at the University of Chicago, and a playwright and artist and poet and comic writer, and all the wonderful things in the world. She has the polymath I desire to be in the future but already living it in the present. But there was a time, a long time ago where she said in a discussion that she works on a Baldwin and sense of love.
(54:00):
A love that requires you to sorry, I love the, requires you to actually confront what is wrong with the world and to fix it and to fix it for people. And it’s something that I have kind of decided to center a lot of my work around that is not always big swings. A lot of times it’s just little efforts of, you know, I wanna make a poster for this group that is doing something really cool or I am going to take some time to make some phone calls for this effort. I’m gonna show up to this county commission meeting that no one else cares about apparently. And you’d be surprised at how much just showing up in presence makes a difference. So I think that my imagined idea of community is one where everyone feels safe to show up and safe, to be able to love each other and to ask for what they need.
Jess (54:57):
I know I should say thank you to Crows, and I do, but in this moment, Paul and Ryan, I’m, I’m really just grateful for you. I’m grateful for your labor. And Molly, I’ll include you in this too because you’re in the group. I appreciate, I so am grateful for your labor in learning about all of these things and helping our community learn. And what I’m most grateful for is your love and stubbornness in showing up and helping us to show up. I’m just, I’m so grateful for your hearts right now. I’m just drowning in it and loving it.
Molly (55:31):
Thank you. Yes. Thank you both so much. I will, I’m gonna sort of send us out with the ways, some ways to get involved. As always, I’ve gotten informed today to get involved with Crow’s. You can go to the Crow’s website, the link will be in show notes, and you can sign the petition, which is sort of an ongoing petition to express support for the principles that Crows has articulated about what Ann Arbor want needs an unarmed response program to look like. And you’ll also be, you’ll also be able to sign up for the listserv so that you can hear about other opportunities to get engaged. One that we know is coming, we don’t have details yet, but there will be town halls and focus groups about what people want from an unarmed response program. These are gonna help inform the city’s eventual request for proposals that will help inform what this program ultimately looks like.
(56:21):
So this is an opportunity to be heard. So when those things come out, we’ll make sure to share them in the various ways that we can, and please do sign up to engage in those things. And that’s it for this episode of Ann Arbor. F. So many thanks to Ryan Hi and Paul Fleming from the Coalition for reenvisioning Our Safety. If you wanna check out past Ann Arbor AF episodes and transcripts, you can do that at our website, ann arbor af.com. Keep the conversation going with fellow Ann Arbor AFS on Twitter at the A two Council hashtag and on Facebook in the Ann Arbor Housing for All Facebook group. And if you would like to send us a few dollars to help us with hosting, you can do that at kofi.com/ann Arbor af. We always appreciate it. We’re your co-host, Molly Kleinman and Jess Litta. Thanks to producer Scott Trudeau. Theme music is, I don’t know, by grapes. Get informed, then Get Involved. It’s your city.