Aqeela Sherrills
2020 visionary of the year
On December 11th Aqeela Sherrills spoke to the global Euphrates community on reimagining public safety. His message of finding the gift in the wound and viewing peace as a journey, not as a destination, reminded us that each of us is a peacebuilder.
Reverend angel Kyodo williams opened the call, setting a tone that beautifully harmonized with the mission and vision of Euphrates. Insisting that peace is the way forward, Rev. angel reminded us that “we are the people that are going to define how it is we live and we are choosing peace...day in and day out, not just by an idea, not just by a theory, not just by a hope and not just by a great by great sound bite, but really by the practice.”
Euphrates Founder Janessa Wilder spoke with Aqeela about his lifelong dedication to healing trauma and seeding peace. He shared his vision for reimagining public safety to not only reduce violence but also to create a true presence of safety. Aqeela emphasized the need to build compassion and understanding into our systems in order to have true transformative social change. Informed by his lived experiences, Aqeela strives to be present, discover the gift in the wound, and find joy in every day.
The following is a transcript of the Visionary of the Year interview between Aqeela Sherrills and Janessa Wilder. It has been edited for readability.
Janessa Wilder
Hello everybody. I wish we had an award in person to give you Aqeela. And this is sort of our 2020 version of just honoring and celebrating in Zoom. So, I wish that we were all here together in person but this feels just as connected, just as rich, just as radiant with life. I just feel the love and the light coming through this. So, I know that we are all itching to hear from you Aqeela and as context for this conversation - every year when we think about the Visionary of the Year, it's been “what is the thing?” What is the thing on everyone's mind and who is meeting the moment? What is this moment about, how do we define it, and who is stepping up to that challenge? A few years ago, when that three-year-old Syrian boy was face down on the beach and everyone just [gasp] - the Syrian Civil War, and the refugee crisis, and our hearts just went out. That year we honored this young woman who was educating Syrian refugees about peace, and she was doing the impossible. And so this year - it's like - who is meeting that moment? We heard from our community as George Floyd - the murder happened - such shock and outrage from so many of you around the world, “how this is happening? What is this about, is this America?” And for so many of us it was the moment, but I know, for you Aqeela it's not the moment. This has been your whole life. So I want to go back to what was it like growing up in Watts? This has been for you just the focal point of your whole life. And so please share with us, just some of your influencing origin stories, and growing up in a war zone as you described it - just would love to hear how it got started for you.
Aqeela Sherrills
Sure. Thank you so much Janessa for this honor of being Visionary of the Year through Euphrates, and Katy and Hollister and sylvia, and the entire Euphrates team. Thank you so much for this honor. And yes, this work. angel coined it many years ago, calling it transformative social change - has been my life's work growing up in the Jordan Down Housing Projects and Watts, witnessing things that no child should ever be subject to was transformative. Participating in what many social justice activists called the longest running war in the history of the US, which is urban street gang wars. LA County alone has claimed, I would say in the last 40 years, probably 50,000 lives and it doesn't include those who have been permanently maimed or incarcerated for the rest of life behind their participation. Violence in the US has been a public health epidemic and public health issue since the inception. However, because many of the victims and perpetrators are young black and brown youth and young adults and we live in a system still that's built on structural violence and systemic racism and implicit bias, the cries of us, and many of the folks in our neighborhood, fell on deaf ears. It became apparent that no one was going to come in and solve our problems for us - that we was going to have to create solutions and solve our own. And so going to college, having a transformative experience. I shared with my college sweetheart that I was sexually abused as a kid, was a survivor [CSA], it was transformative. I mean, I never questioned the violence that I experienced in my own, that I witnessed in the community, because it meant to question the violence that I experienced in my own house, and I didn’t have the language for it. I didn't have the courage to confront the perpetrator.
But there were individuals, you know, around me Dr. Johnny Scott, professor at Cal State Northridge who mentored me who was originally from the neighborhood. Who inspired me to read The Autobiography of Malcolm X, who inspired me to read James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen. And it gave me language and context and courage. And as a result of that we began to organize the peace treaty that changed the quality of life in our neighborhood. I don't have to tell you that in war zones - because many of our viewers from all around the world have had this experience - high levels of traumatic stress disorder, hyper-vigilance by their kids, vicarious trauma. There's a direct correlation between CSA - childhood sexual abuse - and traumatic stress. They have all of the same symptoms. If you imagine in this community that I grew up in where black boys and girls are not seen as human, where we create labels like gangs to dehumanize the people behind it and desensitize the public to the plight because less than 3-5% of so called gang members are actually committing violent crime and murder. But it's because of our skin that we have been criminalized and essentially told that we don't have a right to participate in mainstream society.
For all of those reasons we organized a peace treaty ourselves - a community driven strategy that decreased homicides by double digits in the first two years of the movement. The city adopted our overall strategy - and now over 200 cities across the country - evidence based practices now show that that that community residents, nontraditional leaders, trained as public safety professionals have the capacity to provide safety in our communities at a higher level than law enforcement. Because safety is not just the absence of violence and crime and crime stats, but it's the presence of well-being in the infrastructure to support victims and survivors in their respective healing journey. And the only way that we can do that, if we look at violence as a public health issue and say that we're going to take the public health approach - meaning that we're going to isolate this disease, and we're going to empower and invest in the people who are in closest proximity to the pandemic to be able to provide solutions. This has been the work and the challenge of it. Getting to that place was about exposing the deep secrets and shames that I held in my own personal life as a way of accessing the gift of who we are. When you expose deep secrets and shame you give others permission to do the same. I don't count today, my experience of abuse - although I don't condone what the perpetrator did - I don't count my experience as being a participant in violence and being a victim of violence. Those things are actually informing who we become they don't define who we are. My experience in terms of growing up in the neighborhood, I was fortunate to have all of these different perspectives that help to guide. To help to guide the place where I've arrived today.
Janessa Wilder
Aqeela, there's so much in there and there's so many threads that I know we want to cover. I'm just struck by - here you are growing up in Watts, in that neighborhood, in a gang, surrounded by violence and yet you become one of the leaders, the engineers, of this peace treaty. And Reverend angel talking about no matter what calamity we're facing we are all peace builders. We're all faced with so much challenge right now and yet, choosing peace. I just want to get a feel for you, Aqeela. Did you always have that spark, that something different about you that you felt? Or was it others just generously holding space for you? Like how does someone in that situation find the light, find the way out?
Aqeela Sherrills
Growing up in poverty we didn't have a lot of material possessions. My 10 brothers and sisters - I'm the youngest of the 10 – for what we didn't have materially we made up with our imagination. The youngest five of us used to get in a room every day when we were kids and we used talk about this thing called “the story.” And the story is about how we was walking down the street, we'd fall in this hole, we’d meet this Chinese master who blessed us with special powers and gifts and charges us with changing the world. And I mean we told the story so much. My sister Londi told the best stories and she would assign each one of us powers and we would take turns and embellish on the story. The story would go on for four or five hours and we told it so much as kids that it became a mantra. I really believed that I would grow up and do something great one day as a result of the story. When I found myself in very difficult and hard places I always reflected back to that. God you know you have prepared something great for me, I'm supposed to do something great in the world. The story. And so I've always been able to tap back into that phenomenon. It continues to inform my life – the story – because I'm still growing up. I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. And I'm having just a wonderful time on this journey.
I used to teach life skills curriculum called Amer-I-Can. It was a 15-chapter self-sustaining life skills curriculum. It was the foundation of the peace treaty. When we organize it in the neighborhood, help people make better decisions, how to deal with your emotions, how to deal with your finances. It was really a profound piece of my own development and in that curriculum. We talked about peace as a journey, not a destination. These experiences, good, bad, or indifferent, are informing my healing journey.
Janessa Wilder
Peace as a journey, not a destination. I love that. I wonder if we could get into a little bit of how you came to peace. I mean, who was talking about a peace treaty in the 90s between the gangs, like how this idea of peace came to you. You are surrounded by so much violence with this yearning for peace and then also how the peace practice developed for you. How did that take shape? Both in tangible ways - through a treaty which is like a concrete thing - but also personal element to the peace practice for you and then interpersonal and community. Euphrates, we have the peace practice model which is that peace is both personal, interpersonal, community, and global - it's all those things. It’s sort of a trajectory, not a destination as well, like you're saying, but I wonder how you came to peace and what that model looks like for you?
Aqeela Sherrills
Well, I'll start off by saying that, you know, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote a book back in early 1900s called The Souls of Black Folk. And essentially, in the book, he said that the collective suffering that black folks experienced in this country is our birthright. As a result of this collective suffering that we've experienced during enslavement, it's given us a double vision. We not only see the world through the conceptual view of the colonizers who forced us to see things in a certain type of way and see ourselves in a certain way. We also have our own intuition and our own conceptual view of the world. It gives us this savant-like nature. This capacity to see deeply and to feel deeply into things. It's like clairvoyance - and we don't always trust our intuition around this experience.
You've heard me say that where the wounds are in the personal life is where the gift lie. And then sometimes we have to sit long and hard in the anguish, in the pain, for the gift to manifest. As the saying you know that it's always darkest before dawn. And we hold space for what's possible to emerge from sometimes our worst experiences because we're not our experiences. Those things are informing who we become they don't define who we are. The practice around peace in the neighborhood was a lived experience, each day I was being informed. Through my practice in the neighborhood of holding space for the highest possibilities and probabilities to emerge from the work that we were doing. It started with us marching in the housing projects, confronting individuals that that were enemies. When I say that Watts was a war zone - in the early 80s and early 90s, we’re talking about thousands of people losing their lives. I've witnessed one of my best friends get shot in the head and killed when I was in the ninth grade on campus. I've witnessed people stabbed to death, shot to death. One morning on the way to school, watched my partner get cut in half with an AK 47 - it's traumatic what we witnessed in the neighborhood. How do you work through that? How do you work through it? We had to show up.
It was courses like Amer-I-Can that basically was a short course in human development. That gave us context for a different type of conversation. We learned that peace was a was journey, not a destination. Even the day after the peace treaty someone was shot and it's about consistently coming back to the table to renegotiate the terms that brought us there. We have to redefine betrayal into this thing called necessary betrayal. Because people have been let down, have been promising so much in the neighborhood and they haven't come through. There is a high level of distrust, especially amongst black people. We were conditioned in this country to hate ourselves, to hate each other, and so I like to think of this necessary betrayal. That's when you get stabbed, you don't have to leave at that moment. It's an opportunity to renegotiate the terms that brought you to the table. Because betrayal is necessary for a deeper dialogue and conversation to emerge for one to happen. And so there's the relationships that have to be had on the street in terms of, necessary betrayals and intense dialogue, and then that was the systems we have to challenge because we had a law enforcement system, a public safety system, that's invested in the problem.
Law enforcement justifies this budget based upon how much violence and shooting has to happen in the neighborhood. When we organized a peace treaty and homicides and violence dropped, some of those folks saw that as a threat and they wanted to dismantle the work that we were doing. LAPD has a $57 million overtime budget. They were costing us over $200 million in excessive force and misconduct law suits every year, and now taxpayers is paying for all of this. We had to start thinking not only personally how we receive in our own lives, how we were going to save our own lives and our families on the street, but also how we were going to engage a new system in a new way to approach public safety that included us because we were like, you can't have public safety without public. We have to be at the table as partners leading this movement because again, you can’t have public safety without the public.
Janessa Wilder
I want to get to the community and the public safety thing too, because I know that what you're working on now is just so innovative. But let me go back for a second. I know you said you made the connection, you had this ‘aha moment’ between violence in your household and in your life and in your neighborhood. You said if I could heal myself that would have an impact on the violence in my neighborhood. How did that connection come to you? How did you see the connection between your inner work and your neighborhood and your community?
Aqeela Sherrills
The correlation between my experience with CSA and the high levels of violence, of traumatic stress disorder - I began to wonder if the thing that I had experienced in my own household - because there are no intentional spaces in community for black men and boys to talk about the experiences of abuse or violence or trauma. There was a study that was done a few years ago in the department in the Office of Violence Prevention and DOJ that said that black men are the least helped and the most harmed in the US. The least helped, the most harmed – we’re invisible in this culture when things happen to us. Nobody seems to care because they can create a narrative that scapegoats and marginalizes our experiences. I asked a question, because the anger that I carried in me as a result of CSA and no avenues to be able to talk about the experience allowed that trauma to fester and to ripple and then therefore it found its way in terms of violence in the neighborhood.
Kanda Rice who's a prominent civil rights attorney in the city of Los Angeles did a report, a call to action, about 15 years ago around violence in the city, and specifically gang violence, and basically discovered that less than 3 to 5% of so called gang members are actually committing violent crime and murder. I would venture to say that it's more like 1%.
And that 1% of individuals have high mental health and psychological health issues that don't get addressed when they're in jail. They don't get addressed when they're out in the street because there is no infrastructure, no public health infrastructure, to help people to deal with trauma. There's only a punitive solution. I asked the question is what happened to me the same thing that happened to many other – my comrades in the field? Because sexual abuse takes away the voice. A person has the inability to actually defend themselves. I had to go through a tremendous amount of practice in order to find my own voice and to find my own balance so that I can actually speak up for myself and defend myself.
I was fortunate angel Kyodo williams – Reverend angel - introduced me to meditation as a practice to witness my thoughts so that I wouldn't jump up out of my seat; or when someone was challenging me in the neighborhood I wouldn't jump out of the seat to act in violence. I now have the practice of being able to discern whether or not someone who was highly upset and angry and was shouting at me. I could discern whether or not that shot was about him, or her, or about me. I totally open myself up when I discerned that it was about them. I would quiet in my thinking and my chatter and opening myself up totally to hear them because it's the quality of attention that you give someone that actually impacts their lives more so than what you say. Listening has been a major gift and tool for us to be able to advance this work.
Some of you guys know that my oldest son was murdered 15 years ago and it was a major crossroads and turning point for me because, if you can imagine, I'm pretty well-respected in the neighborhood. There's a conditioned response in our community to homicide like this, and especially when if it's considered gang related. My homies, it was like, hey, we're going to go on a mission and vindicate Aqeela because he didn't deserve that. I stopped them from doing it because I said this eye for an eye, tooth for tooth game that we've been playing with each other in the streets has left us all blind and toothless. Now there's nobody here to provide guidance and direction for the kids who get left behind. I don't condone what this kid did in terms of murdering my son, but I do recognize him as a victim, that he's the victim of a society that doesn't see him as human. This young black boy - no one wants to even know why and what happened in the personal life to him. Because to ask that question means to condone what he did. And that's not the case. I want to meet that kid. I want to know what happened in his personal life. I mean, was he abused? Was there no intentional spaces in community for him to be able to engage dialogue to talk about the experience so that he doesn't define himself by what has happened to him? I hold space to meet his parents to ask, where did they lose the connection or if they ever had a connection with their child. I hold space for the possibility to engage the criminal justice system, but also just to community in terms of helping to find the proper therapy healing or whatever counseling modality is necessary so that this young man can live somewhat of a balanced life in this world. I don't believe that people are their worst experiences. I believe in the divinity of human beings, given the opportunity this young man who took my son's life can get back 10 times out of the average person because it was the so-called killers who had atoned and who had been redeemed who came to the table that helped us to negotiate the peace treaty that changed the quality of life in our neighborhood. There's possibilities.
Janessa Wilder
It's such a mind shift to think about. Because we see black on black crime - they're portrayed all as perpetrators and you're turning that whole thing on its head. No, these are victims, people of your neighborhood, even the boy who killed your son. You can see him not as a perpetrator, but as a victim. That's it. So is that the kind of thing that you're holding space for others? It's remarkable that you're actually able to feel into that and see that and is that the kind of thing that you're holding space for in through your work in these communities?
Aqeela Sherrills
Absolutely. We're creating intentional spaces for these honest authentic dialogues to be able to happen. We have to change the way in which we see public safety. Traditionally, we say public safety and people say police. We know that police are only one aspect of the public safety process. We used to believe that once you've made an arrest and you prosecuted this person that the neighborhood is now safe. We then took the perpetrator off the street. It’s not the end of it. This is a human being. They're alive even though they're in the institution. They can still pick up the phone and can make a call and it impacts the neighborhood. This happens all the time. That's why we say peace is a journey, not a destination. We have to transform the way in which we do public safety because folks deserve better. This whole false narrative around black on black crime - it was created by somebody very similar to how gangs was created. Because you could say on the news that three gang members were shot and killed in Central on 100 and 3rd, and people will be like, “eeh.” But if you say three 14-year-old boys were shot and killed people like, “oh my god them babies.” But if you say gang members and you don’t say 14-year-old boys, people are desensitized. Labels. So this idea, this false narrative black on black crime, just like violence and murders about proximity in place. Black folks invest hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars, into public safety infrastructure in the US. Why are we now responsible for our own safety and our communities? That speaks to the structural violence and systemic racism that permeates our public health and our public safety system and prevents us from accessing resources to provide strategies and services to provide safety and support in our own respective communities. Selling us this frame that law enforcement is a single point of contact for safety - it's just not true.
Infrastructure, community based public safety, the Newark Community Street Team, the work that we do in Newark was about building infrastructure as a complimentary strategy to policing. Training residents as public safety professionals and conflict resolution, mediation, de-escalation strategies, trauma informed approaches, victim services.
Coordinating these services with law enforcement high risk intervention is the strategy that we have to employ with law enforcement only doing targeted deterrence strategies. Because only 1% of perpetrators are actually producing 70% of the violence that's happening in the neighborhood. So why are we spending $230 million on law enforcement and $5 million on community based infrastructure? In terms of the high risk interventionist, the victims advocate, or the assertive outreach worker who are actually living in these neighborhoods – we’re not parachuting in there. When an incident happens, they know about it, they're able to respond, to provide a set of wrap around and supportive services.
That resource remains in the community. It doesn't leave when the law enforcement officer leaves, it remains in a neighborhood. This is why we're at this inflection point - the public execution of George Floyd - is a movement. It was a moment that created a movement. 25 million people flooded into the streets. Our brother’s cry out for his mother's help was heart wrenching. Janessa I think that you've heard me say that I think there was a correlation between the public execution of George Floyd and the execution of Jesus Christ. Innocent men losing their lives at the hand of law enforcement. Crying out to their god. An opening occurred. There's a new possibility in the world that we have that access this Christ consciousness, because now it's here to be able to do something much more profound. I think that what we're seeing with Black Lives Matter nationally and internationally – what we're seeing in terms of this community based public safety movement kind of emerging. These are residents who are taking the public safety process back into their hands and engaging law enforcement in a way that says, “You work for us. You’re public servants.” Now we're going to get this thing back in this proper order so that we could actually serve people and we can create a system that has win wins. As opposed to this capitalist infrastructure and frame that we have where someone has to be poor in order for somebody to happen to be rich. There is opportunity.
Janessa Wilder
Aqeela, when you talk about inflection point and this opening and I just [sigh]…to think about that. It was this public execution that just woke people up so drastically and yet what's amazing to me about a visionary like you is you had this vision in the 80s, and then worked on it and actually had success on it in the 90s, and you've been building. And there are other people. You have so many people you work with, so many partners in this and the foundation for this inflection point is already there. You have been doing this work, and yet we hear slogans like defund the police and it sounds like are we just going to grasp at straws? So can you tell us about the incredible work with Newark Community Street Team and Reverence [Project] - there's so many things that that you're doing - the three-pronged approach, maybe. It's already there. We just need support. It just needs awareness, needs funding. Your approach is there and it's successful and it's amazing. So, do you want to share a little bit more about it?
Aqeela Sherrills
There’s always been a solution to the reimagining public safety/police reform conversation. There's always been a solution for 20 almost 30 years now. They used to call our community gang intervention, then they start calling it community intervention. But we've now defined it for ourselves - it is called community based public safety. It's a movement that has evidence based results in multiple cities across the country, in terms of reducing violence and crime in cities and sustaining that reduction. These are community driven strategies.
The Newark Community Street Team is the city of Newark’s community based public safety initiative, inspired by the mayor. Mayor Raj J. Baraka, hands down the most progressive mayor in the country conceptualized this vision of the Newark Community Street Team, invited me to LA because we have a history. 2004 I helped him to organize the peace treaty in the city of Newark between the Crips and Bloods because Grape Street, my neighborhood in LA, happens to be the biggest Crip gang in the state of New Jersey. He tapped me to build infrastructure to put systems in place for his community based public safety initiative. We hired non-traditional residents from the neighborhood. Trained them through PCITI, the Professional Community Intervention Training Institute. I'm gonna lift up our folks who are doing this work also across the country. Dr. Aquil Basheer came in - one of the best trainers in the country in terms of training residents, how to be public safety professionals, and engage law enforcement in a coordinated strategy to reduce violence and crime.
In our first year, Rutgers University did a study basically looking at 62% of the homicides in the city started as domestic disputes so our belief was that if we stood in the gap, retrain residents to be able to respond to their neighbors with conflict resolution and mediation skills and de-escalation strategies and trauma informed approaches, that we wouldn't have to depend upon the police being called and parachuting in the neighborhood. To take an F.I. card and then leave that because those neighborhoods needed a lot more support and maintenance in order to address these highly traumatic situations. In 2016 we had double digit reductions in homicides in the city because of this coordinated strategy. 2019 we had a 60-year low in terms of violence in the city, removing Newark from the top 10 most violent city list in which they had been for almost 50 years. Our team is celebrated in the city. In the South Ward, where we’ve targeted our work, we had in 2019 a negative 48% reductions in homicide. Our strategy, a team of high risk interventionists, are assertive outreach workers that do safe passage. We have our victims’ advocates that helps folks with victims of crime application. And then we have our community forum. Our policy forum and advocacy forum - the public safety roundtable that happens twice a month that has become one of the most important social forums in the city - policy forums around public safety in the city. In June, we moved 5% of the Newark Police Departments $230 million budget into a new department: Office of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery. That's headed up now by a celebrated activist sister Lakeesha Eure from the city of Newark. Our work has impacted the city and now we're providing those similar services across the state. We partnered with The HAVI headed up by my sister Fatimah Mohammed. The Hospital Alliance for Violence Intervention program. Because it's one of the key locations. When people are harmed, they go to the hospital. We have community health workers embedded in the hospital that meets survivors at bedside. We consent them for participation in our program. Our high risk interventionist meets our community health workers develop a safety plan so that when Raheem was transitioning back into the neighborhood we done met with the folks who have potentially harmed them if law enforcement happen. It's a pretty high threshold in terms of arrest and prosecution. If they don't have the witnesses and the necessary stuff that they need to make an arrest that individual still in the neighborhood. We have to still engage them to make sure that we prevent retaliation from happening. And then we provide all of the support services, hardship assistance, pro bono legal services, therapeutic counseling services through our Trauma Recovery Center with our brother Seaton Davis.
The work again has been phenomenal and now we're mentoring the state. We were instrumental in helping them move $20 million through our Victims of Crime Act to fund hospital-based violence intervention programs across nine different cities and the Newark Community Street Team is providing technical assistance and training to those organizations on the ground like Patterson, with the Patterson Healing Collective, or with Jersey City, the Jersey City Anti-Violence Coalition, or now with our partners in Trenton as we're kind of building out infrastructure for their respective work. We recently produced a report called The Community Based Public Safety Report to look at our work in over 200 cities across the country. We're planning a dialogue right now with the transition team at the White House so that we can say this is solution oriented. We know this conversation around reimagining public safety and police reform. It's not just about investing in more procedural justice training for the cops. This is about investing in community based infrastructure as a compliment to law enforcement so that we work together.
I want to just lift up a couple of folks on my team. Our Executive Director brother Daamin Durden Newark Community Street Team lifelong Newark resident – fierce, our fearless leader. Brother Andre Hunter. I'm saying high risk interventionists, frontline worker, Breaunna McCray. My brother Solomon Middleton-Williams, who was our Deputy Director. Seaton Davis provides therapeutic services for our team. Deysi Maury who manages all of our money. All of these individuals - 100% of them live and grew up in the neighborhoods in which they serve. That's public safety. Public safety is when the public is engaged in and participate in the safety process.
Now we're fortunate that technology has finally caught up. This public safety initiative that human beings have been vibing on the ground and they're saying, “hey, we want to develop tools that supports your respective work.” We recently partnered with Andrew Frame and Citizen who's developed a tool, a public safety app, that allows residents on the ground to download this app and to engage the public safety process. By seeing something and saying something and being able to do it anonymously with the level of protection. This work that we do Newark is only a model of what's happening in multiple cities across the country. We're saying this time for our work to come out of the shadows and be funded thoroughly through government. There's some states and some cities who provide a significant investment. LA $11 million a year to community based public safety work on the ground. New York $36 million a year with this crisis management system. But reinvest the $285 billion in policing last year. And if you look at the collateral damage and unintended consequences, I mean, in New York alone, over the past 10 years the New York Police Department cost taxpayers $1.1 billion in excessive force and misconduct issues. Chicago $700 million misconduct. These are taxpayer dollars. There has to be a more economic way and a way with less unintended consequences to provide safety in our neighborhood and crime stats that doesn't tell us anything about whether someone feel safe or not.
We also have to develop new tools, then measure safety. It should work with those who are most vulnerable in a particular population so that we can actually build systems where victims and survivors are at the center of our public safety strategy and policy. I’m honored to work with system leaders like Mayor Baraka, with community leaders like brother Daamin and Andre and Breaunna and Seaton and Deysi and Solomon and Dorita. Miss Mohammed. So many folks. We’ve grown from a 16-person independent contractor team to now over close to 50 staff full time and part time employees. That's a testament to the people of Newark. That's a testament to the people in Newark. They are passionate. My man Toby Sanders, our Director of Education. We like to call Newark the new Selma. It's the new ark. It's the new Ark of the Covenant. You know what I'm saying. And so there's a lot that's present there that we want to expose to people as a model for what a coordinated strategy around public safety look like. What's the new paradigm of public safety? It’s Newark, New Jersey.
Janessa Wilder
Aqeela. I believe there's questions. I know we need to get those. I'm just going to add this as my last question. Just thank you and your team. I loved hearing you talk about the names of the pioneers. Thank you all. All you pioneers who are doing this work, who are creating the model. My closing question is what is your vision? You're doing basically this pilot - what's your vision for what could happen in this country around public safety? And the other question is, how can we serve you? Serve you and all these pioneers and what is your call to action for us?
Aqeela Sherrills
Yes, Thank you. Thank you so much. Well, the vision is that we need to change the narrative, the practice, and the paradigm around public safety in the US and the world. This is our task family. And it starts with us. The old organizers edit is that we're going to organize the people in the community. And then we're going to, we're going to change. We're going to change the conditions by organizing around issues. The thing is sometimes we don't include ourselves and those who we organize that we have to shift the internal compass in order to change the external purview. The world doesn't exist outside here. It's here [pointing to chest], our brother, it's both. And so the world is in here (pointing to chest). And so one of the things that we hope to do -not that we hope, actually, that we will - we are calling this in and we're going to change the narrative around public safety in this country, in the world, to that violence is a public health issue and that we want to put public safety back in the hands of the public. That public safety is a shared strategy, is not a function of law enforcement. That law enforcement are integral part of the safety narrative, not without, public infrastructure and support. That's what the work is and what we hope to do.
The call to action is that there's an individual role that you can play in safety. There's a collective role that you could play in safety. Individually, I would say start with finding someone that you know and don't know and expose to them deep secrets and shames. Because when we expose our deep secrets and shames we give others permission to do the same and we get an opportunity to empty. To be able to move the etheric energy in the body so that we can make space in the imagination for new things to be able to enter. Because the things that have happened to us, the things that we are perpetrated, don't define us - they're only informing who we become. Sometimes we need to be witnessed. I would say that that as a practice, what I'm saying of sharing the deep secrets and being witnessed so that it actually informs your own personal healing journey.
Secondly, if you're in a city or in a community where Citizen exists I would say download the app because I think it's a very practical way of being able to participate in the public safety process in your respective community. And don't just stop there. Engage that app, reach out to those folks, the program managers in there so that we innovate on the technology so that this thing doesn't become sitting next to human beings who do public safety infrastructure. We need to integrate these models.
The third thing I would say is launch a community based public safety initiative in your neighborhood. Launch community based public safety initiative in your neighborhood as a complimentary strategy to policing. If there's one that exists, reach out to us and let us know so that we can actually offer support, turn them on to some of the national trainers - the Advance Peace, Cure Violence, or The Professional Community Intervention Training Institute, Urban Peace, Life Camp. There's a number of organizations who do this work exceptionally well and I would say there's a systematic approach that’s present in community based public safety that all of our agencies use. We might organize it a little differently. I think that at Cure Violence, Dr. Gary Slutkin, they've done an exceptional job at kind of codifying our best practices and putting them in one place.
Just a couple of other pieces - you can invest in this work. You can invest in this work. So, you can write a check to support it. You can join advocacy work in your respective city. This work not only exists on the ground in neighborhoods and it's driven by community based organization, but there are also system leaders. There's Offices of Violence Prevention and Trauma Recovery. There's offices of neighborhood safety. They’re system leaders. If you're more comfortable working with systems and that's where your background is then you can work with them. Help them to better move dollars to community based organizations. Help to create better partnerships. On a high level with government we got to advocate to our governments. We have to utilize the data to inform our public safety strategy. If 70% of public safety calls are for non-violent, non-serious offenses in our respective community then we don't need to be spending billions of dollars on police infrastructure on that. We want them to target on that 1%. Give us our tax dollars to provide safety in our own respective communities so that you don't have power over us but you have power with us. This is a shared strategy and we need you involved with this process. I don't want to brush by quickly the piece around the money either. I love raising money. I love giving money. I'm invested in this work with my time and my energy as well as with my dollars and so I ask you to do the same.
Start in your own neighborhood, in your own respective communities first. Because you'd be surprised. Man, there's a lot that's happening on the ground. In communities across the country and folks need support. Sometimes they just need kind of like the infrastructure and systems to be able to receive it. And that's something that either I or folks in our network can support you with.
call to action
We all have a responsibility to participate in community based public safety. Aqeela offers paths to support and engage in this work:
Aqeela shares, “when we expose our deep secrets and shames we give others permission to do the same, and we get an opportunity to empty.” On an individual level, spend time opening to vulnerability. Find someone you know, someone you don’t know, and allow yourself to be witnessed. When we allow our full selves to be present, to be seen, to be heard, we engage in our own personal healing. To contribute at interpersonal, community, and systems levels for change, we also must tend to the presence of peace and healing within ourselves.
Download and engage with the Citizen app if it exists in your community. Research and educate yourself on community based public safety initiatives in your own community or city to get involved. If one doesn’t exist, launch an initiative in your own community.
Join advocacy groups in your respective community or city. Learn about your local offices dedicated to public safety. Advocate to shift funds towards community based organizations.
Invest. When we choose peace, we must invest in peace. Contribute to local organizations actualizing these community based public safety strategies and practices.