Conflict Skills Can Prevent Police Violence
Starting again, Conflict Transformation, Police Abolition
Preface: Hello! I am restarting this substack after two years away. If you subscribed a long time ago, I hope you’ll stick around—if you’d rather not, you should be able to unsubscribe at the bottom of the email. The content will remain about Conflict Transformation and conflict skills from an anti-oppressive perspective. I will post 1 - 2 times per month, and for more regular content you can follow me on instagram at @luna_n_h (my old account was donated, so I am restarting fresh). You may be wondering where I’ve been - for the last year I worked at a local effort to create an unarmed, non-police crisis response program—bringing to life a decade-long dream relevant to this post. I’ve also been learning to be a therapist and will graduate in December. I’ll share more about that in future posts, I’m sure.
Trigger Warning: Brief mention of police murder in the first sentences of the first and second paragraphs; skip to “Some Straightforward Steps” to avoid these mentions. Thank you to the person who requested this warning.
Sonya Massey should be alive. She called for help, was followed into her home by police because they felt a need to surveil her (get her ID), and then killed her. Her murder is yet another moment of national reckoning with the violence policing brings to communities—particularly poor, Black, and indigenous communities. What does this have to do with Conflict Transformation? Everything. Destructive conflict is one of the primary reasons police are called into neighborhoods—fear of our neighbors, arguments over issues we could resolve ourselves, social conflicts between people who have property and people who don’t. Conflict Transformation means recognizing the content of our conflicts—but also the social context in which those conflicts occur (structural racism, neglect, and violence) and the responses that exacerbate or suppress, rather than address, those conflicts (surveillance, fines, arrest, incarceration, law suits, control, coercion, abuse).
For the last ten years, I have been lucky to organize and build community alongside abolitionists who envision a world without police violence. Many of us came together after a local murder, similar to Sonya’s, of Aura Rain Rosser. Since the 2020 murder of George Floyd, more and more people across the U.S. have invested in alternatives to police—organizations like The Healing and Justice Center in Miami, FL, Mental Health First in Sacramento and Oakland, and Call Bubbie in Portland, OR are a few organizations centering liberation in their efforts to provide care and crisis response without police. These efforts are incredible signs of hope and inspiration. But, not everyone has an organization like these who they can call. That can leave us feeling like our only option in moments of crisis is to call 911 or leave our neighbors without help.
As someone who has done crisis response work both professionally and informally for many years, what I’ve learned is this:
We don’t need to wait for an institution.
We can be who we need right now—to reduce calls to police, to prevent police presence, and to prevent the violence that inevitably comes with both.
Some Straightforward Steps
Identify an area of your life where the following are true:
There is a small group of people who would be willing to support each other in conflict and crisis; and
Those people are physically close enough to each other to respond in an urgent situation.
For example—your workplace, school, neighborhood, sporting club, family, public library or park. If you work in Park & Recreation or Public Libraries—you have an incredible position from which to make change—these are some of the few places left in our society where people without money can gather and receive resources. Unfortunately, that means people are often vulnerable to surveillance and interaction with police in these spaces.
Get together and ask each other:
what kinds of situations bring police to this area?
of those kinds of situations, which could we handle ourselves (without force) with the right skills?
For example—your neighborhood might have a lot of noise complaints, your street may have a lot of public intoxication, your workplace may have a lot of patron disputes or arguments, you may have high rates of interpersonal/domestic violence, people who hear voices having the police called on them, health issues dur to climate impacts, overdoses, or people sleeping outside.
Based on that list, identify the skills you would need to be able to respond confidently:
what skills do you already have within your group?
what skills do you need that you don’t already have?
who is willing to learn what?
where/how can you learn those skills?
For example—de-escalation and bystander intervention trainings are pretty common (direct message me if your group would like one, I’m willing to do these for free for people who are trying to create alternatives to police); first aid trainings—often these include CPR, AED, wound care, climate health/environmental health, and overdose reversal; overdose prevention and reversal trainings are increasingly common from harm reduction and public health organizations; mediation (particularly Inclusive Mediation which is geared toward neighborhood disputes); and crisis mental health care or mental health first aid (be careful, some of these are madphobic).
Skill up together or divide up your skills. Make sure you can always show up to a crisis in pairs.
Come up with a secure system for calling on each other or being called upon to show up as an alternative to police. This can be as simple as having a Signal thread or Protonmail account (for non-urgent).
Security: Using secure channels is really important for your safety and the safety of the people who may be involved in a response. You don’t want to create any documentation about the crisis, especially if it may involve illegal activity(e.g. someone has drugs on them, someone was driving without a license, someone trespassed on someone’s property). Harmless activities are often criminalized, and it’s important not to create evidence that could be used against you or someone else.
Talk about consent and non-coercive care.
How will you ensure that you only go where you are called (not patrolling or surveilling)?
How will you ensure that the help you offer is what people want?
How will you ensure you aren’t using coercion (forcing people into care or support)?
What will you do if police also show up?
Coercion: Most of us are socialized to believe that people who use substances, who have mental health struggles, or who engage in violent behavior are “out of control” and must be controlled by others in order to create safety. This leads to people being forced into “treatment” or “containment” against their will. As a community-based care provider—as long as you are not licensed—you have no legal obligation to coerce anyone into care, and you can offer support that can be declined. When someone says “No,” it’s important to honor that no. You can offer resources, contact information, food, but their self-determination is the priority if you’re practicing in an anti-oppressive way.
Note: Don’t talk to the police, you are not legally obligated to. Be aware that you can be charged with a misdemeanor or felony (depending on your local laws) if you obstruct the police or resist an arrest. These laws are oppressively used as another tool of policing to pressure people not to interfere or undermine law enforcement. Using courage and creativity, we can prevent them from using these threats to deter our efforts.
Start small. Offer what you can to each other—call on each other when you need support. As you practice and build confidence, let others know what skills you have and when you’re willing to be called upon to use them. These seemingly small steps can provide people with an alternative option to calling the police—that reduces interactions with law enforcement and expands people’s imaginations about what is possible.
A small group doing their small part can prevent potentially deadly and life-altering interactions with the police.
Many small groups doing their small parts can have a transformative impact on how communities respond to conflict and crisis.
Conflict Transformation
As you practice intervening in conflict and crisis, you’ll begin to notice patterns in the causes of these situations. You’ll notice that people fight because they are hungry, haven’t slept, don’t know where they will sleep or eat, have not been seen or heard in a long time, have experienced threats from the state, are stretched thin trying to care for their elders or children, were chronically in crisis all their lives.
Conflict transformation means going beyond addressing the conflict and crisis itself, but trying to prevent the suffering that is caused by the roots of the conflicts in our communities. Addressing these roots will prevent destructive conflict and crisis and therefore reduce reliance on police. Reducing reliance on police interrupts the State’s narrative that we need them to keep us safe. Do not underestimate the power you and your networks have to take that narrative away from them.
Can’t do Crisis Response?
Not everyone has the time, capacity, or ability to do crisis response. But there are other things you can do—
Just skilling up in conflict skills, particularly communication, can help ease tensions that might bubble over into more serious issues.
Gaining any of the crisis skills above can mean you are prepared when something comes up at the grocery store, at a protest, or at your front door.
You can gather data about what police are being called for in your area—usually these data are publicly available, and you can notice trends for why people are calling police. Get together with friends and think of alternative resources and options and share that information with people nearby—help them see that they have other options and don’t need to be quick to dial 911.
Notice patterns in the root causes of destructive conflict and crisis that leads to police calls and advocate for more resources to address those, or initiate a social program to intervene yourself. Free food pantries. Support groups for people who have experienced violence. Trainings on the dangers of white people calling police for every “suspicious” thing they see.
Look at your local city or county budget. How much money is going to police, courts, and incarceration compared to life-affirming care? How much revenue is your local police department making off of fines against poor people? Publish this information to help your community understand how the police are actually defunding our communities—not the other way around.
You are not powerless—especially when you get together with people you trust who are willing and able to take action.
Opportunities to Act + Learn
Listen to One Million Experiments to learn from people who have created their own alternatives to police and other abolitionist projects.
Check out this podcast (The Fifth Branch) about a new crisis response program in Durham, North Carolina that is diverting calls away from police. While these governmental programs are exciting and important for legitimizing non-police responses, we have to ask (and pay attention) to whether these programs that are part of the state can really provide non-coercive, anti-oppressive options, or will they reproduce the tools and practices of policing in another name?
Read Shira Hasan’s brilliant resource Painting the Ocean and the Sky about mutual aid projects and principled social services.
Check out this amazing resource, Interrupting Intimate Partner Violence, about interrupting interpersonal violence without police.